By Shannon Stephens
The most illuminating text on writing pedagogy I’ve read lately— and the most challenging to my prior views on the topic—is “Should Writers Use They Own English?” by Vershawn Ashanti Young, published in the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies in 2010. This essay is framed as a response to Stanley Fish’s New York Times op-ed “What Should Colleges Teach?” in which Fish argues that college writing instructors should abide by the mandate to teach Standard Written English (SWE) as a way of “protecting” students who use “non-standard” dialects from marginalization in the academy.
This is an approach I’ve heard before. Indeed, it’s one I’ve used myself: I’ve frequently brushed off my discomfort at the conflation of SWE with “correct writing” by telling myself that helping students write the way the academy expects them to is the best way to ensure their scholastic and professional success, even if it contributes to the exclusion of their home rhetorics from what is commonly classified as “good writing.”
In response to this approach, Young emphasizes the “intertwined” nature of “language differences” and “racial differences.” He asserts that, by labeling the linguistic patterns of groups that are underrepresented in academia as “incorrect”—a process he refers to as “dominant language ideology” —writing teachers contribute to the exclusion of those groups. In addition to encouraging the marginalization of certain groups from the academic sphere, dominant language ideology fosters “internalized oppression” through “linguistic self-hate”—thus silencing voices and robbing mainstream discourse of crucial perspectives. Further, he describes the double standard of dominant language ideology, noting that minorities are expected to perfect SWE in order to gain higher-level academic positions, while whites can achieve these positions without doing so. As such, he argues, the focus on SWE as the only “correct” way to write is a tool of racism in academia.
As an alternative, Young pushes us to teach writing “descriptively” rather than prescriptively. That is, he advocates that we “teach how language functions within and from various cultural perspectives … teach what it take to understand, listen, and write in multiple dialects simultaneously … teach how to let dialects comingle, sho nuff blend together … [and] enlarge our perspective about what good writin is.” This is possible, he argues, because “nobody can or gon really master all the rules of any language or dialect”— no, not even those of us who consider ourselves “writing experts.”
So what does “good writing” look like for Young? It code meshes. Unlike “code switching,” which Young says teachers like Fish have taken to mean translating one dialect into another, more “standard” one, code meshing involves “blending two or mo dialects, languages, or rhetorical forms into one sentence, one utterance, one paper.” Young’s essay itself is a demonstration of how code meshing can work, as he employs the very linguistic and rhetorical strategies he sets out to defend.
To readers who still reject the possibilities of code meshing, Young points out that we already code mesh all the time, both in our academic writing and in informal speech, whether that means blending “online” and “offline” dialects, the “casual” and the “formal,” the rhetorics of multiple cultures, or even the language of different regions. What he’s advocating for, he says, is an acceptance of the meshing we already do—and especially, an acceptance of the code meshing that minority groups do, as he emphasizes examples of white people code meshing in ways that were deemed acceptable by the general public.
Young has me convinced. After reading his essay, I am ready to reject Stanley Fish’s claim that pushing SWE “protects” minority students, and I want to hold myself accountable for the role I play in maintaining problematic attitudes about linguistic diversity in the academy. However, as a writing center consultant, I’m in a sticky position: though I may want to teach descriptively, this approach often contradicts the mandate of my students’ assignments to write in a “grammatically correct” way.
I don’t have an answer for how writing consultants can push back on the problematic emphasis on SWE, though I do think that destabilizing the too-easy resolution of “well, I’m just following the professor’s mandate” or “I’m only helping this student get good grades” is a good start. We might also consider ways of striking a balance in consultations between helping a student work towards the expectations of an assignment—including abiding by the directive to use “correct language”—while also using descriptive approaches to help students observe the strengths of their “own” rhetorics, imagine what an effectively “blended” rhetoric might look like, and observe the power dynamics at play in the emphasis on SWE.
I will also push myself to frame code meshing, for my students, as a tool to expand the potential of their language. As Young says, “code meshing benefit everybody … the metaphorical language tool box is expandin, baby.”
Published May 15, 2018
