fight the powers that be

Good readings this week--mainly because they tie into my increasing dislike of Academic English (remarkably whiter than Standard English). I recently had a friend of mine make a comment to me about an impenetrable essay he was reading for a Shakespeare class (he has a degree in journalism and is currently getting a BA in lit): "This is completely classist. It's like they expect you to have 100 thousand dollars' worth of education before you can even understand what's being said." He's not exactly being oppressed in the same way that Black readers and writers are, but his situation is still a good example of how a certain self-perpetuating style can shut people out--especially if they have to write in this style. Banks' satirical comment about Standard English as the "promised land" made me laugh, because really, where does Standard English come from.

In my class I recently did an exercise about the fallacy of blackboard grammar (which is what they seem to be most comfortable with after high school); for me, the most important part was showing the students where most of the writing rules we're familiar with come from. For the most part, two elitist jerks (AKA prescriptive grammarians) from the 18th Century wrote most of our rules, primarily out of Latin envy. They viewed Latin as an immaculate language, and adapted many strange rules over from the dead language. For example, the infinitive in Latin is a single word, so of course it's a grave sin to split the infinitive in English. These rules were perpetuated by the very tiny amount of people who actually received a college education before the GI Bill, primarily to distinguish themselves from uneducated or lower-class speakers. So the very foundation of Academic English is rooted in classism and racism. We academic writers usually use the excuse of "Just following orders" when it comes to using this style, but I think it's important to also recognize its history.

The Wikipedia article was interesting to me because it actually reflected the way my students edit their papers; as Jones said, inexperienced writers overproduce microstructure edits. When I got back revised papers from students, I noticed that they almost always add material to a paper without necessarily integrating this material into the whole. So I had to tell them, "Make sure you're thinking about how your revisions affect your entire paper; just don't tack on the information that's missing." It's true that they are very hung up on the superficial aspects of their writing, and, as Jones points out, this is affecting their editing processes. I try to get them to focus on content above the tip of the iceberg stuff, but it's a tough battle.

Right now, I'm a little worried about the final project. I've only had the time to start doing my research this week; I have a general question but I'm not really sure what to do with it. I definitely want to create this project as a blog while incorporating many videos, but I need a little more grounding first. Hopefully I'll be able to get something done this weekend and over break.