Our Language Within our Writing

There are many different ways we communicate with each other. The way we talk with friends is different from the way we talk to our coworkers. It is also different to how we talk to our parents. Everyday we change the way we speak to others, that being either going in and out of languages or the way we talk with our dialects. Having to filter the way we talk can be hard, especially within our English classes. It is always hard to maintain a formal or academic tone within our assignments. I have always wondered if we could bring our own voices into our papers without getting points taken off because the tone isn’t formal.

It is interesting to learn from the text we had to read this week, that the way we learn to write in school is called standard written english. I would’ve never thought that the way we were taught in school would be the standard and that it's not an objective criteria set. From the reading, I saw this, “Instead it is an ideal that centers a ‘norm’ often conceived as white, upper-middle class, ‘accentless,’ and male, built from a myth that our society needs only one language for unity.”. Reading this made me realize that everything that we learn is always connected to a certain class or usually to white males. I would never understand why when we are learning and understanding the English language there weren't ways that it could capture the reality of multilingualism. Talking in formal or academic ways within papers was always difficult because I would have to change so many words and reword things to make sense to the teacher. Having known Spanish before English and having to learn English was difficult since the grammar is different. I would’ve been happy if I could’ve expressed myself properly while writing some papers. In most of my papers my voice within these papers are very monotone. That was something that I didn’t like, which in the end made me not enjoy writing. Even when we were given some liberties, there were still rules we had to follow.

Within the reading they also gave us strategies and approaches that can help us incorporate our dialects into the academic writing. The first strategy is called “cultivating your words’. This means to write down anything that comes to mind for five minutes about the topic chosen. This allows us to not need to focus on having to filter through all the thoughts. Anything we say too should be written down since that can also help put more ideas together. After having done all that, we should be able to go in and edit things, put our thoughts together and then revise all that and lastly proofread everything. The second strategy is called ‘seizing up the situation’. This means to tune into what others are saying and how they are saying things, just to observe the situation. This process can look differently for others but the important thing is tuning in and understanding the balance and the expectations of the writing conditions and what one feels is important to say about the topics. The next strategy is called ‘building a writing community’. It means having the resources to support our own writing process. This means having tabs open to help with the writing process or having resources that were given to us opened as well. That helps with ensuring we have the requirements needed for an assignment.

References

Sara P. Alvarez, Amy J. Wan and Eunjeong Lee. "Workin' Languages: Who We Are Matters In Our Writing." Writing Spaces, edited by Dana Lynn Driscoll, Megan Heise, Mary K. Stewart, and Matthew Vetter, Parlor Press 2022, pp. 1-12.