On Reading and Comprehending an Attendance Policy on a Course Syllabus

What does Bakhtin have to do with attendance policies?

Introduction: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Life of Language

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian literary theorist and philosopher whose ideas about language continue to have a profound influence on how we understand human communication. Unlike mainstream linguists who often study language as an abstract system of conventions, Bakhtin was interested in how language is taken up and made material in lived experience—how real people use words in specific situations to get things done, to relate to others, to make, unmake, disguise, and remake meaning.

At the heart of Bakhtin’s thinking is a deceptively simple concept: the utterance. An utterance is any complete unit of communication—a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a full conversation, even an entire novel. What makes something an utterance is not its grammatical completeness but rather that “the boundaries of each concrete utterance as a unit of speech communication are determined by a change of speaking subjects.” When one person finishes speaking and another begins, an utterance ends and a new one begins.

Bakhtin’s idea was and remains ideologically revolutionary: no utterance exists in isolation. Every utterance is a link in what Bakhtin calls a “chain of speech communication.” Each utterance both “responds to prior utterances and anticipates future responses.” Every time you speak or write, you’re responding to things that have been said before, and you’re anticipating responses that will come after. Language, for Bakhtin, is irreducibly dialogic—always in conversation, always answering and provoking answers.

A Simple Example: Ordering Coffee

Consider an everyday exchange at a coffee shop. You say, “Can I get a grande latte?” The barista asks, “Hot or iced?” You answer, “Hot, please.” The barista follows up: “Name for the order?” You reply, “Sarah.”

Each of these utterances is complete in Bakhtin’s sense—it invites a response and it receives one. But each utterance is shaped by what came before. Sarah doesn’t say “I would like to purchase a large coffee beverage with steamed milk.” She says “grande latte” in response to prior utterances—she’s heard this language used at coffee shops before, she knows the genre of coffee shop ordering, she’s internalized the vocabulary. In reading theory in the 1970s, this type of exchange was termed a “script” or a “schema.”

The barista asks “Hot or iced?” Why? Because previous customers have been unclear, because corporate training emphasized this clarification. That question responds to a history of miscommunication, even though in the moment no one is conscious of this fact. When Sarah says “please,” she’s responding to her grandmother who wouldn’t give her the cookie until she said it. The barista asks for her name, not because she wants to get to know her, but because the company created a system to manage multiple orders, which itself was a response to the problem of crowded stores and confused customers.

This unpeeling reveals the utterance chain. Each spoken moment turns back on everything that shaped it and forward to everything it will shape. We don’t invent language fresh each time we use it—we enter a stream of ongoing communication. The words we use are what Bakhtin refers to as “populated with others’ words”—they come to us already carrying the intentions, contexts, and meanings of previous speakers. We pick them up, use them for our purposes, and send them forward changed by our use.

A Student Reads a Double-Voiced Utterance

When a first-year college student encounters an attendance policy in a syllabus, they are meeting what Bakhtin would call a double-voiced utterance. Language simultaneously speaks in multiple registers, carrying competing intentions and ideological positions. Every speaker is an ideologue. The student, who is also an ideologue, doesn’t read this policy in a vacuum. They bring with them a history of prior utterances they’re responding to.

Their high school teachers said: “Students are required to attend classes on time. Three tardies equal one absence.” Their parents said: “You need to go to class on time—we’re paying for this.” Orientation leaders said: “College is about freedom and responsibility. You have to learn to make good decisions.” Older siblings and peers said: “Some professors don’t care if you show up.” And perhaps their own inner voice said: “I’m an adult now. I should be able to decide for myself.”

The attendance policy on the syllabus is not a neutral statement standing on its own. It’s a response to prior voices, and the student reads it as such, trying to determine which of these voices the professor aligns with and what the actual expectation is beneath the formal language. Just as Sarah ordered coffee drawing on previous experiences standing in lines, this student draws on prior experiences with rules about showing up. The student reads the attendance policy through the lens of every previous experience with authority and compliance.

Two Poles of Language: Authoritative and Internally-Persuasive

Bakhtin observed that language exists along a continuum between two poles. He called these 1) authoritative discourse and 2) internally-persuasive discourse, and understanding the difference between them is crucial for making sense of how students read syllabi. By extension, this difference applies to how students read assignments.

Authoritative discourse is “privileged language that approaches us from without; it is distanced, taboo, and permits no play with its framing context.” Think of sacred texts, legal language, or institutional policy. This kind of language demands to be acknowledged. It comes backed by power. We don’t engage with it so much as we either accept it or reject it. Bakhtin says we “recite” authoritative discourse—we repeat it back unchanged.

Internally-persuasive discourse, however, works differently. It isn’t privileged, and it approaches us from within. Instead of feeling alien, it is “more akin to retelling a text in one’s own words, with one’s own accents, gestures, modifications.” This language has been assimilated, filtered, acclimatized. When we create internally persuasive discourse for ourselves, we’ve taken someone else’s words and made them our own. We’ve convinced ourselves that we value this information for good reasons. This language has power not because of external authority but because it connects to our own developing ideology. We can play with it, question it, adapt it to new situations.

Consider again the coffee shop example. When Sarah first started ordering coffee, “grande” might have felt like authoritative discourse—the official Starbucks language she had to use correctly or feel foolish, or maybe misorder. But after ordering many times, it became internally persuasive. She made the word her own. She wants a grande. She can riff on it: “I’ll take a not-so-grande grande latte—actually, make it a tall.” She can explain it to a friend who’s never been to Starbucks. The word has moved from being alien (what Bakhtin calls čužoj, “someone else’s”) to being her own (svoj).

This movement is what Bakhtin calls assimilation. According to Bakhtin’s translators, “We communicate by crossing barriers: [either] leaving our svoj [our own words] or making another’s čužoj our own.” There is always a space between our own intentions and the words we use, “which are always someone else’s words” that we can claim as alien or owned. Grande is Starbuck’s word; we claim it as our word when we use it to place an order. Closing this gap means coming-to-consciousness.

Coming-to-Consciousness: The Movement from Recitation to Assimilation

For Bakhtin, the process of moving from recitation to assimilation—from authoritative discourse received without thought to internally-persuasive discourse made one’s own through struggle—is necessary to bring existential thinking to bear meaningfully on matters of existence. This movement is nothing less than “coming-to-consciousness.”

This is the central claim: consciousness requires assimilation. When we merely recite authoritative discourse—repeating it back unchanged, without thinking through what it means for our own lives—we remain unconscious. “I’m writing this essay because it’s required to pass the class.” We are ventriloquizing someone else’s ideology without bringing our own existential concerns to bear. When we struggle to assimilate discourse—taking alien words and wrestling them into our own understanding, testing them against our experience, making them speak in our own voice—we come to consciousness.

The coffee shop example demonstrates ultra low-stakes assimilation. Sarah moved from reciting Starbucks corporate language to making it her own. But the stakes are much higher when the discourse carries ideological weight—when the words we must use already position us within aesthetic and epistemological power relations we didn’t choose and don’t fully understand. We have to write a paper about heroism in The Iliad.

This coming-to-consciousness is where the attendance policy becomes crucial. It’s not just about showing up to class to recite and earn credit. It’s about why we show up for class, what kind of language-user we are in class, and therefore what kind of learner a student is becoming.

Scenario One: Pure Authoritative Discourse

Imagine a student encounters this attendance policy:

“Attendance is mandatory per university policy. More than three unexcused absences will result in grade penalties as outlined in the student handbook.”

This language approaches the student externally as an alien. In some universities, it’s a required statement. It’s not trying to persuade the student that attending class is valuable. It’s simply announcing the rules backed by institutional power. The phrases “per university policy” and “as outlined in the student handbook” signal that authority comes from elsewhere, from above, from structures the student has no power to question or modify. The language “permits no play with its framing context.”

The student can only recite this back: “Okay, three absences. Got it.” They might say to their roommate: “I can miss three classes before it hurts my grade.” Notice they’re repeating the policy’s logic without making it their own. The words remain alien. The student performs a calculation: three absences are allowed, so budget those absences strategically. Perhaps save them for the end of the semester when overwhelmed, or use them when they’d rather sleep in, or deploy them when they have conflicting obligations.

What cannot reasonably be expected to happen here is assimilation. The student cannot take this language and make it part of their own developing ideology about why learning matters, why showing up matters, why their presence might matter to others. The policy has raw power over the student—”will result in grade penalties”—but creates no internal conviction about the value of presence. The language remains čužoj, alien, someone else’s word that the student must navigate but need not understand or internalize. In this case, the language is a policy. In a different case, the language is an assignment.

When authoritative discourse loses its backing power—when the semester ends, when the student discovers the professor doesn’t actually enforce the attendance policy, when they graduate—it “becomes a dead thing, a relic.” It never became part of how they think about learning, about commitment, or about participating in a learning community where one’s absence is felt by others. It was always just a rule to follow or circumvent. The student remains unconscious.

They’ve learned to recite institutional language and to game systems of compliance, but they haven’t engaged in the existential work of asking what presence means, what responsibility means, what kind of person they want to become.

Scenario Two: Creating Space for Assimilation

Now imagine a different policy, this one added to the mandatory language in a footnote on the syllabus:

“I don’t take attendance because I trust you to make choices about your time. But this class depends on everyone’s presence—we’re building something together each session. If you miss more than a few meetings, you’ll find yourself outside a conversation that kept moving. If you find yourself too far outside this conversation, credit for this course could be in jeopardy. That’s my commitment as the course professor.”

This language still comes from outside—it’s the professor’s words, not the student’s. The professor is a voice of the institution. It contains a threat. But it creates what Bakhtin’s translators describe as “[a] gap between our own intentions and the words—which are always someone else’s words—we speak to articulate them.” In this case, a chasm exists between the official “three unexcused absences” and the professor’s being “too far outside this conversation.” The policy as a rule plus a footnote isn’t a rule; it invites the student into a particular relationship with the policy language, with the nature of the class, and with their own agency.

The student might think: I want flexibility, but I also want to belong. I want freedom, but I don’t want to miss out. I want to be trusted, but that means I’m responsible not just to myself but to others. These thoughts represent the stirrings of assimilation—the student is starting to retell the professor’s utterance “in their own words, with their own accents, gestures, modifications.”

The student might say to their roommate: “So basically, she’s saying we’re all responsible for the class working.” Or: “If I skip, I’m not just hurting myself—I’m bailing on everyone.” Or: “She’s not going to track me, but she’ll know if I’ve checked out. It might be better to just have three absences to bargain with.” Each of these retellings represents the student taking the professor’s words and pulling them through their own belief system, their own concerns, their own developing sense of what matters.

This is assimilation in action. The professor’s words about trust, collective responsibility, and ongoing conversation become internally persuasive, forcing consciousness to emerge, because they connect to values the student already has or is developing: wanting to be treated as an adult, wanting a college degree, wanting to belong to something meaningful, wanting their choices to matter. The language hasn’t simply been recited—it’s been assimilated, wrestled with, made into something the student can use to think with.

In the first scenario, the student asks: “How many classes can I miss?” In the second scenario, the student might ask: “What am I missing when I’m not there?” That shift in question represents a shift in consciousness. The student has moved from calculating how to comply with external demands to considering what it means to be present, to be responsible, to be part of something larger than themselves.

The student is coming to consciousness because they’re bringing existential thinking to bear on the question of attendance. They’re asking what this means for their life, for the lives of their peers and their professors, for who they’re becoming, for what kind of person they want to be.

When Professors Inherit Authoritative Language They Cannot Change

Even when professors inherit fully authoritative language—mandated attendance policies they cannot modify, required Title IX statements they must recite verbatim, institutional land acknowledgments scripted by administrators, external competence tests they cannot change or waive—they retain one crucial pedagogical move: they can frame the authoritative discourse they’re compelled to transmit.

A professor might read the mandatory attendance policy aloud, then say: “I’m required to include this language. I didn’t write it, and I can’t change it. It comes from structures above both of us. This policy will be enforced because it must be. But I want you to think about what it means that we’re both subject to language neither of us authored—you as students who must comply, me as faculty who must enforce. What does this authoritative discourse assume about learning, about trust, about institutional control? I’m telling you this so you understand the constraints we’re both working within and can begin to think critically about them.”

When the professor frames mandatory language by naming it as authoritative—”this comes from structures above both of us”—they make thoughtless recitation impossible. Students can no longer just note “okay, three absences” and move on. They must now struggle with what this policy means, what it assumes, how they make sense of institutional authority that mandates language neither professor nor student authored.

This struggle brings existential thinking to bear on the institution itself. The student must ask: What is my relationship to institutional authority? How does it shape my relationship with my professor and my peers? What does presence even mean? How do I navigate power structures I didn’t create? What kind of language-user am I becoming—someone who complies and recites, or someone who actively constructs meaning even from mandated language?

The student might conclude that attendance policies serve legitimate purposes and develop their own language for why showing up matters. Or they might conclude that such policies represent institutional overreach but recognize they must navigate this reality strategically. Either way, they’ve done the work of assimilation—taking alien discourse and thinking it through in their own terms, bringing their developing ideology to bear on institutional language.

The professor who frames authoritative discourse forces students into consciousness-forming struggle—not by giving permission to reject the policy, but by making it impossible to accept without thought.

The Utterance Chain Continues Forward

An utterance, for Bakhtin, is never complete until it receives a response. The attendance policy doesn’t finish its work when the student reads it.

The student might tell their roommate: “My professor doesn’t even take attendance—she just trusts us to show up.” That utterance enters the roommate’s consciousness and might shape how they read their own syllabi.

The student might write on a course evaluation: “The attendance policy felt like a guilt trip.” That evaluation becomes an utterance the professor reads and responds to when revising next semester’s syllabus.

The student might write in a journal: “I realized I was skipping class not because I couldn’t go but because I was avoiding the work of engaging.” That private utterance might shape future choices.

And of course, the student responds through action, by choosing to attend or to skip, which is itself a response in the utterance chain.

Each of these responses becomes a new link in the chain. The conversation doesn’t end; it spirals outward. The professor wrote the policy responding to years of frustrated attempts to enforce attendance. That frustration was itself a response to institutional pressure to document learning outcomes.

That pressure was a response to accreditation requirements. Those requirements were a response to public concerns about whether college is worth the cost. Those concerns connect to broader cultural debates about education, responsibility, and the transition to adulthood.

The first-year student reading that attendance policy on syllabus day is stepping into this vast, complex chain of utterances. It’s not a simple matter of reading the syllabus, of receiving information. They must align themselves with certain values and against others to become a particular kind of language-user and therefore a particular kind of person. It is possible to earn an undergraduate degree for utilitarian reasons by compliance with authoritarian policies without ever coming to consciousness through dialogical communion.

The Deeper Stakes: What Kind of Language-User Will You Be?

The first-year student must learn college rules regarding presence and self-presentation. They’re also learning what kind of language-user they can become—whether they will relate to institutional language as subjects (people to whom things are done) or agents (people who can make things mean something), and how to hear the difference between language that demands obedience and language that invites engagement.

The attendance policy, seemingly mundane, becomes what we might call a site of consciousness-formation—a place where the student learns what kind of person they’re becoming. As Bakhtin would say, “Every word/discourse betrays the ideology of its speaker.” The attendance policy is an ideologeme—it carries within it assumptions about power, trust, learning, and human nature. The student reading it must decide whether to recite that ideology back unchanged or to struggle with it and make it their own.

Why This Matters

Bakhtin’s framework reveals something crucial: documents like syllabi are not neutral containers of information. They are utterances in ongoing chains of communication. They carry ideological positions, and they shape consciousness by offering certain kinds of language for students to either recite or assimilate.

When we understand this, we can ask better questions about the language we use to regulate and incentivize the development of scholars in our classrooms. What utterance chain is this policy responding to? What prior voices has this student internalized? Does this language permit “play with its framing context,” or does it demand submission? Can a student assimilate this language into their own developing consciousness, or can they only recite it back?

Just as ordering coffee is never just ordering coffee—it’s participating in a complex web of corporate branding, service labor conventions, consumer identity, and evolving social norms—reading an attendance policy is never just reading rules. It’s entering a conversation about power, trust, learning, and what it means to show up for something that matters.

The question Bakhtin leaves us with is this: Are we creating opportunities for language in our classrooms that students can assimilate into their own developing consciousness, or are we speaking in authoritative voices that they can only recite back?

The answer matters because language doesn’t just communicate consciousness—it evokes, shapes, reshapes, and transforms consciousness. Every instructional utterance addressing students as intentional and intelligent agents is an opportunity for students to practice being a certain kind of person and a certain kind of language-user. The attendance policy is a minor administrative detail vis a vis the institution, but in Bakhtin’s worldview, it’s a site where students learn whether language is something that happens to them or something they can use to make their own intentions and interests materialize in the world.

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Notes and Context

1. Bakhtin (1895-1975) lived through Stalin’s purges and spent years in internal exile. His focus on dialogue, the struggle between authoritative and internally-persuasive discourse, and “coming-to-consciousness” through language takes on deeper meaning in this context—these weren’t just theoretical concerns for him, but questions of survival and resistance under totalitarianism. When Bakhtin writes about authoritative discourse that “has great power over us, but only while in power; if ever dethroned it immediately becomes a dead thing, a relic,” he’s writing from experience. He knew intimately what it meant to navigate language that demanded ideological submission, and he understood that the ability to maintain some space between oneself and authoritarian discourse—to assimilate thoughtfully rather than recite automatically—could be a matter of life and death.

2. His insights are particularly relevant in this historical moment as we face the rise of authoritarian movements in the United States and globally. The question of how we relate to authoritative discourse—whether we recite it unconsciously or struggle to make conscious sense of it—is never purely academic.

3. Bakhtin developed his theory of the utterance across several essays, most notably in “Discourse in the Novel,” collected with three other essays in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press, 1981). The other essays—”Epic and Novel,” “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” and “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”—explore how the novel, as a genre uniquely open to heteroglossia (multiple voices and social languages), provides the ideal site for studying utterances in their full complexity. In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin argues that the novel is “the maximally complete register of all social voices of an era,” making it the perfect laboratory for understanding how authoritative and internally-persuasive discourse interact, how words become “populated” with others’ intentions, and how speakers engage in the constant struggle to assimilate alien words into their own systems of meaning.

4. Authoritative discourse presents deep paradoxes for education. On one hand, it can preserve vital truths across generations—sacred texts, constitutional principles, scientific laws—providing stability and shared foundations for communities. On the other, it can become a tool of oppression, demanding obedience without understanding. The challenge for educators is recognizing when authoritative discourse serves genuine pedagogical purposes (disciplinary standards, ethical principles) versus when it merely enforces compliance. Unlike internally-persuasive discourse, which we’ve made our own and can adapt, authoritative discourse cannot bend—it can only break.

5. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving crystallizes the transactional dynamic that authoritative discourse creates. Some professors “gift” the class period as a goodwill gesture, acknowledging travel realities. Others hold firm, viewing it as capitulation to consumerist expectations. Students negotiate strategically: “Should I use one of my three absences now or save it for finals week?” This very framing—absences as currency to spend—reveals how authoritative discourse creates what it claims to prevent. The policy meant to ensure attendance instead teaches students to game the system, transforming presence from meaningful engagement into mere compliance arithmetic.

6. Bakhtin is notoriously difficult to read. When I asked literacy scholar David Pearson thirty years ago at a New Standard’s Project meeting in Colorado how he approaches Bakhtin, he replied, “I read at him.” The difficulty stems partly from unfinished manuscripts, Bakhtin’s proclivity for cryptic fragments, and translation challenges. Mostly, it’s the depth of the thinking.

   David’s remark “I read at him” is rich with interpretive possibilities I’ve pondered since Colorado. Reading at Bakhtin suggests an aggressive, confrontational stance—not allowing the text to wash over you but pushing back against it, arguing with it, refusing to be subdued by its difficulty, not trying to receive what Bakhtin offers but wrestling with it, even attacking it to make it yield meaning. The preposition “at” suggests indirection—you can’t read Bakhtin straight-on and expect to understand him. You have to come at him from angles, grazing the meaning rather than penetrating it directly. Like trying to see a faint star by looking slightly away from it, you might understand Bakhtin better by not trying to understand him completely. Reading at someone implies treating the text as an interlocutor—you’re performing your reading, making utterances at Bakhtin in the same way he theorizes we make utterances at each other. The reading becomes dialogic in the most literal sense. You’re not mining Bakhtin for ideas to extract; you’re engaged in an utterance chain with him. There’s an element of exasperation in the preposition choice—you can’t read Bakhtin well or closely or carefully, so you read at him. It’s almost an admission of defeat transformed into method. Since comprehension feels impossible, you settle for directing your intellectual energy toward him without expecting full understanding. Reading at keeps Bakhtin at arm’s length. You’re not reading with him (as a companion) or into him (seeking deep understanding). The “at” maintains critical distance, perhaps protecting yourself from being overwhelmed by the difficulty or from making false claims of comprehension. David was probably acknowledging the shared experience of finding Bakhtin nearly impenetrable while also offering a survival strategy: don’t expect mastery, just keep directing your attention at the work and see what sticks. Over the years I’ve come to appreciate how David’s remark performs what it describes—it’s cryptic, requires interpretation, and resists easy paraphrase. Much like Bakhtin himself.

7. Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” (1979)—”We don’t need no education / We don’t need no thought control”—represents a powerful link in the attendance policy utterance chain. The song articulated student resistance to authoritarian pedagogy for a generation, giving voice to the experience of education as oppression rather than liberation. When today’s professors craft attendance policies, they’re responding (consciously or not) to decades of such critique. The internally-persuasive attendance policy acknowledges this history: it tries to distinguish genuine invitation from “thought control,” trust from surveillance. It recognizes that students arrive carrying this critique in their consciousness, and it must address that prior utterance if it hopes to move beyond mere recitation toward genuine assimilation.