Linguistic Justice and Equity Readings

How We’ve Been Taught to Write Versus What Might Be Possible

When you think about writing for school, you’re probably imagining composing “formal/academic writing” where you are trying to make yourself sound like an expert, putting on an objective “academic” tone that can often feel far removed from your own voice. You might have the experience of “cleaning up” your voice to make yourself sound “appropriate,” aware that people who read your writing might make assumptions about how much you know based on what words you use. Because you often move in and out of different languages (beyond English) or lingos—how you communicate with your best friend vs. how you communicate with your coworker at the local electronics store, for instance—you might be trying to filter out variations of your voice for those different ways of communicating. Doing this work, essentially trying to silence your voice, can be exhausting. And honestly, this reduction of your voice can make writing feel difficult, irrelevant, and monotone (aka boring). (p.1-2)

The three of us, too, have wrestled with questions like, “How do I bring my own voice into academic writing,” and “How does who I am matter in my writing?” Over the years, we have developed a number of writing strategies and approaches that help us shift away from our own self-doubts and writing hurdles. What if you didn’t have to turn off who you are when you’re writing? What if we shared with you that the different ways you use languages in your everyday life can fortify your writing as you design your academic voice? As we show in this essay, we have gained critical practices to embrace all of our languages as part of who we are, shifting our writing from what’s “appropriate” or “standard” to thinking of our language vision, playfulness, and voice as part of what it means to be a language architect. (p.2)

Alvarez, Wan, and Lee’s Journey

We want to start by recognizing that embracing who we are in our writing is a journey. It takes time for each of us to feel confident that “I matter in my writing” and comfortable with seeing ourselves as language architects. In our K-to-Ph.D. schooling experiences, the three of us have identified a number of situations that taught us to believe that the full extent of our voices did not belong, matter, or “fit” in “academic or formal” writing settings; even now, we occasionally find ourselves experimenting with new ways of bringing our full selves into our writing. In this manner, we must acknowledge that while schooling spaces may mean well, they often engage ineffective and harmful writing approaches that view the richness of our language(s) as problems to “fix” (Kinloch). For example, as an international student of color who used to speak English as a non-dominant language, Eunjeong felt pressured to make herself sound less of who she is—a multilingual, transnational, and immigrant-generation scholar with ample experiences with how to work languages. Eunjeong often focused on following the “rules” of writing, mainly “finding” lexical and syntactical “errors,” commas, and article usage. She often sought to be read as “objective” and “neutral.” Subtracting her voice from her own writing was not difficult for Eunjeong given the prevalent focus on English proficiency and stigma surrounding international and immigrant-generation students like her. To Eunjeong, this stigma and standard assumption about how to assess “good” writing is like the air we breathe; it’s always there, and no one needs to point that out to you. We believe it’s not just Eunjeong who does language in this way.

What if you didn’t have to turn off who you are when you’re writing?

Should “Perfect English” Be a Writing Ideal?

When it comes to writing, ideas about what is “appropriate” are often at the heart of judgments about whether writing, and by extension the author, is “good.” These judgments also often connect to what social scientists identify as a process of racialization, by which specific and codified racial meanings are applied to communities of people, their languages and cultural practices. Thus, judgments on “good” writing extend inequities and negative racial codings in our society while suppressing our linguistic and cultural pluralism. More so, these beliefs about good “academic” writing often reinforce so-called standard written English, a way of falsely understanding writing in an English language as objective and monolithic. Yes, you read this correctly: standard written English is not an objective set of criteria. 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 (without any form of variation) for unity (“Talk American”). Of course, such a belief does not capture our multilingual reality. Many of you, who communicate within families, school, work settings, and online spaces in different languages, likely already know this and have gained great expertise on workin’ languages, even though school and other authoritative bodies might make it seem otherwise. (pp.3-4)

Any time you are about to start a “new” writing assignment, you are already equipped with ample ways of voicing and translating, with tools and ways of knowing. Tuning into the abundance of your voice, identifying its many variations and how these plural ways of voicing work with and for different types of audiences, is a way to continue building on your experiences, your linguistic resources, as language architects. The more you practice your different ways of communicating, the stronger and broader these resources become. Being aware of the richness of your linguistic resources when you write, as well as conscientiously engaging these resources can guide you in becoming a more effective writer, and, more importantly, one that feels more genuine to yourself.

The struggle with finding the “right” words has a lot to do with how we have been taught to censor our voices, how we extend monolingual ideology on ourselves. But one way to counter this struggle is by proceeding to write (sketch, outline, list, draw) whatever words and ideas come to us as we think about the task at hand. Engaging a writing assignment in this form allows us to mess with the writing process, and to open up opportunities for ourselves to hear the many variations of our languages. Once we have some words, ideas, frustrations on paper, we give ourselves small writing tasks, like “just write whatever you can or feel about X topic for 5 minutes.” We might go back to a passage in a related reading and write about our response. We might record ourselves talking and then write down what we find useful.The writing will sound the closest to how we sound in our heads with multiple languages and ways of speaking [...] The strategies we’ve discussed here will help you turn to your own translingual-oriented practices, which are, of course, embedded in your own lived experiences and worlds and the ways that you’re already workin’ languages. These approaches centralize your own practices so you can continue languaging and stance-taking away from the deficit perspective in the various writing tasks you might encounter as a student and as a writer in the world. And importantly, translingual stance-taking and workin’ of languages is a work toward linguistic justice for all—particularly for those of us whose languages are racialized in different ways. If the ways that we do language cannot be equal, then as a society we must collectively work to change that. (pp.11-12)

Many have declared the English essay dead, but I’m not terribly panicked by the so-called death of the stiff, formal, lifeless English essay. Rigor Mortis done set in long ago.

Writing instructors have been concerned about essay-bots for some time, and I am one of them but only insofar as they prevent students from learning how to form both what they know and have learned into long form written ideas. And only insofar as they discourage opportunities to cultivate their own voice, critical thinking, creativity, and sound argumentation.

Authors of “Workin Languages,” Alvarez, Wan, and Lee, while not addressing AI writing models, do hit on a reason so many are seduced by AI and turn to it to do their writing and thinking for them: “The struggle with finding the “right” words has a lot to do with how we have been taught to censor our voices, how we extend monolingual ideology on ourselves.” When we censor ourselves we interrupt our thought processes and create doubt. Such doubt often turns to fear and procrastination which can cause many of us to take short cuts, rely on formulaic writing structures, or abandon writing altogether for generative AI.

When instructors deprioritize “standard English” and invite students to write in authentic voicings that respect cultural wealth, class backgrounds, queerness, disability status or lived experiences, students get excited about writing because they are able express themselves in ways that are natural and familiar to them. They can bring they own lingo, social concerns, grammatical structures, and even words from other languages when those other words feel more precise.

I know what many instructors - and students too - are going to say next, and I’m already cursing in Spanish under my breath.

What about the real world?

Is it possible for writing instructors to encourage students to write in their own voice and/or invite other Englishes into teaching and still prepare them for academia, for the job market, for the real world? Is it possible for students to embrace their own voice in the academic classroom, even without the encouragement of writing instructors?

Given the evolution of English and its current diverse usages in the United States of America online and everywhere else, and given the major demographic shifts, the question we really ought to be asking is this one:

Can educators of students from all backgrounds in a country in which the majority of students are students of color, in good conscience, continue to uphold American Standard English (which is in no way any better or more superior than any other form of English), or White English, as the communicative norm?

Especially when the language that is most alive all around us - whether in song lyrics, such as Pulitzer Prize writer Kendrick Lamar, theater, advertising, political discourse, or vibrant intellectual writing such as Zadie Smith and Javier Zamora, is not written in American Standard English.

Given el montón of young people leaving higher education, shouldn’t educators be more concerned about creating a better sense of belonging, making schools a soft place instead of a stiff, cold, hard place that prioritizes only “one white way down the middle of the road”?