Post 1: Response to “Should Writers Use Their Own English?”
As a linguistics major, the last thing I expected to be confronted with was my own internal biases regarding linguistic choices in the article “Should Writers Use Their Own English?” by Vershawn Ashanti Young. After all, I don’t typically think of writing and grammar as a tool that can be used to discriminate and control. While reading Young’s article, I realized that the standard “dominant” form of language we think of as the only acceptable form of academic language is harmful to many people, especially in the incredibly globalized and diverse society we live in.
The first thing to catch my attention in the article was the juxtaposition of a scholarly topic with many intellectual insights written in a stereotypical “non-scholarly” way, or as Young would classify it: not the dominant language ideology. I was caught off guard at first and had trouble understanding the article because I had never been exposed to academic ideas being presented to me in this language form. Young’s casual tone, use of slang and misspellings, and lack of “proper” academic grammar made the article sound like he was using the voice-to-text feature on his phone to compose it.
Although I was confused at first, I quickly understood Young’s point in the article and how the language that we accept as “standard” is a language full of vernacular that non-native English speakers might not have, and only the top tier of academia may have. Our specific slang, word choice, accents, and syntax differentiates us from the masses and let readers know who we are as writers — why are we forced to hide our identities and conform to a dominant language while expressing important and academic ideas?
Young claims that there is “more than one academic way to rite.” The mass acknowledgement and subsequent acceptance of this idea will greatly benefit society, tearing down more walls between humans. Just because we write in different ways and speak in different tones does not make any idea any less valid or important. When we accept the “code meshing” Young addresses, we allow ourselves the opportunity to access as well as provide more authentic and genuine conversations. Speaking more from the heart and less from our filtered and biased brains.
Even while writing this, I felt like I was filtering myself to speak in the traditionally academic manner, and conforming to the dominant language ideology. It is so hard to write genuinely when you have been trained your whole life to write in certain manners for school papers but completely other manners for communicating through other mediums like texting. At many points I find myself unable to even communicate my own words without putting them through the dominant language filter. The difficulty of accepting all different forms of linguistic expression and engaging in genuine academic discourse makes it all the more important that we try to unlearn the biases we hold toward certain writing styles and make room for more acceptance in communication. The essential point of writing is to communicate ideas to one another, and if this task is accomplished who’s to say that you didn’t do so in the “right” way?
