i h8 to tell u, but i can txt & code switch: Teaching Correctness vs. Teaching Rhetorical Choices

image from Big Ten Science

In a recent blog post on GOOD Education called "'Wat up wit u': Yep, Texting is Killing Students' Grammar Skills," Liz Dwyer explores the claim that texting is destroying writing and cites the findings of a recent study on 10-14 year old texters. Researchers found that the more texting a 10-14-year-old did, the more grammar errors they made in non-texting writing. Ultimately, Dwyer claims that this is not simply because kids are texting, but because they are not given adequate opportunities to practice the formal academic concepts of grammar in school due to the focus on high-stakes testing and quick-to-grade non-writing-intensive assignments from overwhelmed instructors.

While I think Dwyer is accurate in claiming that better writing instruction is needed, I don't buy it all. "Grammar" is, of course, one of those concepts that fascinates me. Grammar seems to be a blanket statement for everything sentence-level-related. The problem is, aside from the fact that people don't even always know what they mean when they use the term "grammar," that there is more than one form of grammar. What Dwyer and the researchers are looking at is not grammatical correctness, but Standard Academic English correctness.

Texting has its own grammatical rules. If grammar was completely unimportant to texting, there would be no language patterns, and we would have a hard time understanding one another. On the contrary, we easily understand text messages, sometimes more easily than "grammatically correct" academic writing.

Also, it's quite elitist to say that students who text don't understand writing or have corrupted the English language. Language evolves. New words come into existence all the time, as old ones disappear. If it didn't, we'd still be speaking Old English. Language is a living thing that adapts to the times. To stay stuck in a place where we believe that students only need to know the conventions of Standard Academic English is to disadvantage them. They will need all kinds of literacies to navigate the complicated technology-inundated 21st century.

I think we do students a big disservice by telling them they are simply "incorrect," red-penning their paper, hoping they stop using text lingo, and trying to pass that off as "quality writing instruction," which is what Dwyer seems to recommend. We need to teach our students about why we use certain conventions. What does Standard Academic English represent? Why don't we use text language in papers? What do these conventions symbolize and how do readers interpret them? We need to teach students to think about the rhetorical situation-- Who do they want to reach? What do they want to say? How? And why?-- not to apply a formula or use a set of prepackaged options. When they learn to do that, they can better communicate on all fronts, not just the academic or the technological.

Voice and Normativity

Yesterday, in one of my graduate courses (Composition Theory and Teaching Writing), we were talking about the work of Brodkey, Grimm, LeCourt, Port, Denny, and Villanueva. Some really interesting critiques/theories arose. For me, the most compelling idea-- given my interests in voice, authenticity, and grammar-- was the notion that one can only have a (writing) voice if she/he is close to the center/the norm. As a middle-class, well-educated, white woman, I am very close to that norm, which means I have been granted access to my "voice," and I never considered that the language of education might deny others their own.


I have since begun to understand that when students are far from that normative ideal, their voice is denied, labelled incorrect. Instead of embracing these different voices, education seeks to mold it into the language of the white middle class. Furthermore, in order to do this, students are forced to give up their accented language, which is ripe with their ethnic, cultural, and familial ideology and identity.

This idea is frightening. As a composition teacher, I unconsciously enact this middle class ideal all of the time. How many alternative voices am I squashing by saying, "This is a bit too conversational," or "This is a sentence fragment" or the dreaded "This sentence reads awkwardly"? On the other hand, when we have a society which functions primarily on middle class capitalist/consumerist ideals, is it right to dismiss these notions of middle class correctness and accept all voices as correct in my classroom? Should students be forced to make that choice? Is it ethical to teach them code-switching, or is that teaching them to lie about their identity? 

Furthermore, once they have given up those working class ideals, it seems that students (or any one for that matter) can never truly go back. In my own life, my friends would certainly look at me funny and even think that I was pretentious if I began to talk about Foucault's theories of inscribing power in Discipline and Punish and their relationship to democratic education. It is something I simply cannot do if I want to remain an accepted member of our group. I must stifle my educated voice because it is incorect. If I wanted to fully embrace my scholarly identity, I most likely would have to give up my childhood friends. It seems that in order to enact one class role, I must give up the other. For me, these are minor denials of self, but for someone far from the center, they are forced to give up much more. 

Fan Shen's "The Classroom and the Wider Culture" is a perfect example of this. Shen came from China and was taught that the use of "I" was bad. He should never be concerned with the personal, the "I'; he should only be concerned with the collective "we." In American composition and culture, however, we are obsessed with the "I," and so to write well for school, Shen had to embrace the "I" and leave behind the "we." It wasn't just a shift of language, but a shift of ideology. He had to give up his Chineseness to become Americanized.

Truly, there are so many questions I am left with. How can I ethically teach when my views are clouded by classed ideologies? How can I advocate a "good use of voice" when it's clear that by invoking standards of grammar and English, I am pushing a certain voice on my students? After all, grammar is a set of rules for the most unruly thing-- language. While it sounds like a good idea to have a standard middle ground, whose middle ground is it really? Is it fair that some people are coming in closer to that "middle ground" than others and yet all being held to that same standard? And finally, if grammar is all about normativity, is it productive to enforce it, especially in a cultural that proclaims its appreciation for diversity and individuality? 

Why Stephen Fry Thinks There Should Be More Anglophones... and Fewer Grammar Fanatics

From RogerCreations, the creator of this video:

Using the wonderful words of acclaimed writer, actor and allround know it all (I mean that in the best of ways) Stephen Fry I have created this kinetic typography animation. If you like what you hear you can download the rest of the audio file from Mr. Fry's website. stephenfry.com and then go to the audio and video section at the top of the page and look for the file entitled language. You can also find the file on iTunes by searching the name 'Stephen Fry's Podgrams'.

I loved this particular essay on language and I thought it would be the prefect opportunity to make my first kinetic typography. I hope you like it and even if you dont I would like to heard what you think in the comments section. Also I know that at point the audio does not match the text so you doesnt have to write that. It is because I copied the transcript off of Stephen's website and it was not 100% exactly what he said and i did not notice until I was well underway. However these cases are few and far between.

Just incase you were wondering the programs I used to make this were all by adobe. Mostly after effects but also flash and illustrator. Flash for the changing background colour transitions and illustrator for putting the words in to the shape of 'language' before loading it into after effects to animate.

Enjoy

A "Gooder" Look at Language in the Media

Watching late-night television, a certain ridiculous commercial caught my attention. The commercial itself was really mediocre advertising at best (I don't even remember the product it was promoting), but as someone interested in concepts of Englishes, grammars, signs and signifiers, and audiences, I couldn't help be struck by one simple word-- "gooder." Hearing that word, my head bobbed up from my laptop to catch the last 10 seconds of the clip.

In the commercial, a woman named Jane and a female friend are talking about (I think) a weight loss product, which her friend says is "gooder." Jane's initial reaction is to say, "gooder isn't a word."

Following shortly after Jane's remark, her friend notes enthusiastically, "Jane, you look gooder!" This time, Jane ignores the grammar trespass and agrees. Jane, of course, comes to accept "gooder" as a real word, when it conveniently describes her weight loss and makes it better than just plain "good" progress.

I think this commercial, as simple and silly as it is, acts as a metaphor for hierarchies of rhetoric. Jane, the current traditionalist grammar critic, is unable to accept "gooder" as a word, until it becomes a term that enhances her own authoritative position. It also makes clear that the thin woman (the social norm) is in a higher position of authority than her friend who has not yet tried the weight loss product. Thus, the silly, seemingly benign interaction between two gal pals evokes power structures and mainstream ideologies hidden in language.

Just one of the guys... err, pals.

When people say "ignorance is bliss," they aren't kidding. Learning about language has totally ruined my life! Ok, so maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but really, taking Literary Theory and Composition Theory has completely changed my way of looking at the world. I can't do so much as go on Facebook without thinking about language and ideology-- which is how I was inspired to write this post.

Today, I was struck by something I say all of the time. A friend wrote about girls who are "one of the guys" in her Facebook status, and I thought, "Well, hey, I'm 'one of the guys.'" For most of my life, at least up until my sophomore year of college, my closest friends were predominately male. When I was younger, I would climb trees with the boys, ride bikes with the boys, hike in the woods with the boys, and light things on fire with the boys. When I got older, I watched football with the guys, drank with the guys, watched action movies with the guys, and talked "locker room" talk with the guys. To this day, of my three closest friends from home, two are male. When I'm feeling bummed, I can call "my boys" for a bar night, possibly followed by a diner run and Guitar Hero at 3 A.M. It's great being "one of the guys." They talk openly around me and never treat me like I'm a delicate lady, whose ears must be protected from curses, dirty jokes, and belches.

So what's wrong with being "one of the guys?" Aside from the fact that it assigns gender roles and puts women down as the weaker sex, annoying and overly-conscious of societal norms? I don't think I've ever heard a guy say he's just "one of the girls" (at least not seriously). Any guy who admitted to being "one of the girls" would undoubtedly be mocked for it. Why is it ok for girls to be "one of the guys," but not vice versa? In truth, I don't know many men, especially not straight men, who have mostly female friends, though I know many females who empathize with my situation as "one of the guys." That seems rather ridiculous.

I think this is a good example of how seemingly harmless language can really be quite harmful. "One of the guys" reveals quite a bit about our culture and about the dominating ideologies that circulate here in America. It suggests that women want to be men and that female friendships are somehow lesser than male friendships. While we think the gender landscape is evening out, small phrases like "one of the guys" are evidence that there is still quite a way to go. If we become more conscious of our language, however, we can began to shift the male-dominated language to one that is more gender-neutral and thus change the ideologies that privilege white heterosexual upper class males.

Can anyone think of other examples, or does everyone think that I'm completely out on a limb here?

Seeing Red... Pen

Though I don't claim to be an expert in the field of composition, my experiences as a writing center tutor, as a student, and now as a professor have lead me to see trends in education, not all of which are good. One trend I find particularly unsettling is a seemingly new-found student obsession with grammar.

Working as a tutor, I see students come to sessions all the time claiming that they need to work on their grammar. Even worse, sometimes they demand that I ignore their content and only address their grammar. This doesn't just happen in writing centers, though. After asking my Composition course students what they thought made good writing and what they thought were their writing weaknesses, I found that grammar was reiterated over and over again. When I asked them to define revision, there was almost no mention of anything idea-related or content-based. Nearly every revision step they suggested was related to editing and proofreading, in other words, looking for grammar error. My own brother, who is now a college freshman, repeated these sentiments when he would talk about writing during his senior year of high school. He had good ideas, but when he talked about the papers he was writing, he almost never discussed his ideas. Instead, he talked about page limits, formats, and how to fit his list of examples into a prescribed structure for essay writing.

Perhaps, I'm naive, or I experienced school much differently than my peers, but I don't remember being obsessed with grammar when I transitioned from high school to college. My high school years, however, took place before there was any attention paid to the SAT Writing Section. Today's traditional freshman students are part of this next generation. Their high school writing experiences include very little creative writing or writing done at home that is later brought back to be workshopped. High school writing assignments consist mainly of 30 minute topic-based timed essays with a focus on test-prep, if I'm understanding correctly.

But is there something more to it? I can't help but think there must be. The way I hear students talk about language and think about grammar tell me that something else is happening, something cultural, something deeply tied to our democratic, multi-faced society. comPOSITION, I hope, will present a social space for the continued exploration and inquiry of this trend.