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Reforming Our Concepts of Grammar, Style, and Standard English By Valerie Balester, Texas A & M University

Our professional view of standard English is too narrow and prescriptive. Just as we have learned to value process and consider rhetorical situation in composing (that is, in argument or content), we should value the rhetoric of style, grammar, mechanics, and document design. Teachers can't actually prescribe an appropriate style, or even the appropriate sentence structure, except in the broadest terms (use "middle style"). Teachers can only show ranges of options, describe reader responses to options, suggest ways to follow or disrupt conventions. This is especially true in general or First Year composition courses or in technical writing or similar courses not tied to a specific discipline.

But in all kinds of writing, at some point student authors must be critical, must solve problems and make judgments and create interpretations. Just as Art Young, on the Teaching Composition Listserv, proposes that creative writing hones problem-solving skills, I propose that all writing instruction can have the same effect, by means of a similar, if less intense, attention to language. Writing done in preparation for college or even for the workplace does not have to adhere to a narrow or absolute linguistic code. We can teach other ways with words, ways that might sometimes be a bit unusual, but can still be effective. We ought to consider whether our composition texts and handbooks, with an emphasis on Standard American English narrowly conceived, reflect real written language usage, especially outside the academy and in political or civil contexts.

The basic premise of my current Advanced Composition course is that student writers should explore many dimensions of English and reflect upon its variety, rather than be constrained by a narrow conception of Standard American English or academic discourse. Even in their academic writing, I want to demonstrate, students can get personal, use colloquial language or other varieties of English (Ebonics, Spanglish or one of its many Latino variants, or a new one I just learned about from a student, Hinglish (that is, the English of Hindi-speaking immigrants) or other languages (here in Texas, most notably Spanish but also Vietnamese, Korean, and others). Thus, the course ties together academic and personal writing; writing about self and writing about civic and social issues; and writing in conventional academic prose but with the confidence and daring a professional writer can bring to the task.

Generally, students are a bit resistant to reflecting upon language. Like the public at large, they either think they already know everything about it, or they cast themselves as hopeless novices. So I teach a few lessons on the basics. I've found that classes where I spend a bit of time on linguistic concepts such as language variety, language change, code- and style-switching, and overt/covert prestige are the most successful. (In Coming of Age, you can find some of my specific recommendations for texts.)

The teaching of writing, from grade school and onward, has historically been rigid and prescriptive. It's the same old thing Peter Elbow and Ken macrorie were saying in the 60's and 70's. Many student writers are, frankly, stilted, verbose, and grammatically challenged. The remedies of the "expressivists"--personal writing, writing about topics they know about or care about, freewriting--are helpful in that they encourage fluency. Although they have been criticized for not teaching the code students will need for academic success, that is not where I see expressivists really falling short. On the contrary, I think their recommendations to edit for "standard" or "appropriate" English is really just the same old adherence to the same old code. As soon as students attempt to make prose sound appropriate for teachers, as soon as they consult prescriptive handbooks or remember so-called rules like "Never use I," they lose any sense of the variety, and of the rhetorical effectiveness of these alternatives. Grammar, word choice, even mechanics are rhetorical and stylistic devices. Students need options, and a sense of how these options work with audiences. They need sophistication about reader response, and permission to break into colloquialisms, slang, fragments, even comma splices. And not only when they write "creatively." If we truly want to teach style in prose writing, we need to teach how writers work within and against conventions, genres, and reader expectations for effect.

I don't quite mean the old "you have to know the rules to break the rules" here. Granted, the better they know the standard code, the more versatile they can be. But they don't have to know how to write a sentence before they are allowed to use a fragment for stylistic effect. In other words, learning to write needn't be merely a skills-based, bottom-up proposition; it can be top-down and holistic as well. Students have intuitions they can work from, as, for example, when they produce a comma splice because of rhythm. Point out the comma splice, explain the grammar and the conventional punctuation, and prompt students to consider reader reaction before they revise (or don't revise). Let them know possible audience responses to code violations as well--but don't scare them. If we look at all those essays that crowd our readers for their style as well as their content, we'll remember that writers do all sorts of things with Standard American English.

A final thought: The term "Standard American English" is somewhat problematic, as is "Edited American English," yet in our textbooks and in our composition culture, it seems a given, an unchanging, eternal norm. Can anyone help with an alternative?

Bibliography

Balester, Valerie. Cultural Divide: Case Studies of African American College-Level Writers. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook-Heinemann, 1993.

"[T]he African-American preacher's art, thanks to orators such as Martin Luther King, Jr., is afforded some measure of attention and respect in college writing classes, yet, considering the scope of African-American rhetoric, this seems but a token. Tea meeting speeches, ring-play songs and jump rope rhymes, prayers, rifting, fancy talking, signifying, and modern-day rapping are other legitimate and influential verbal arts forms that could profitably be studied in the writing classroom. An emphasis on African-American rhetoric would be an opportunity to expand and enrich our academic discourse that, under a paradigm of white, middle-class, male domination, has traded flexibility for stability and has thus become more rigid than it need be" (159).

--- ---- "Writing about Race and Ethnicity." In Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum. Eds. Linda K. Shamoon, Rebecca Moore Howard, Sandra Jamieson, and Robert A. Schwegler. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2000. Accompanied by CD-ROM.

"As writing teachers, we have long advocated encouraging experimentation with diction, sentence structure, or punctuation. Always within safe boundaries, always with the acceptable, appropriate, standard. In "Writing About Race and Ethnicity," when I teach it, I will challenge that safety and ask my students to help redefine standard and appropriate style. It is at this point of challenge that people tend to get nervous. Isn't this irresponsible? Won't we give students the wrong impression about what they can do in the real world? To me, such protests smack of linguistic insecurity. What students need to learn as writers is a realistic sense of what writers can and do achieve with language. Look at real prose in the real world. You'll find it far more daring than you'd realized" (on CD ROM).

Bizzell, Patricia. Academic discourse and critical consciousness. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

"I reject the idea that any form of literacy in and of itself can provide critical distance on the world or, one may as well say, critical consciousness" (26).

Campbell, Kermit. "'Real Niggaz's Don't Die': African American Students Speaking Themselves into Their Writing." Writing in Multicultural Settings. Eds. Carol Severino, Juan C. Guerra, and Johnella E. Butler. NY: MLA, 1997. 67-78.

"Isolated and alienated as [African-Americans] often are in predominately white universities, these students need to feel that, apart from their facility with the conventions of academic discourse, they do belong and are already speakers with place, privilege, or authority." (78)

Neal, Maureen. "Abdominal Conditions and Other Cretins of Habit: Hyperfluency and the Acquisition of Academic Discourse." In Attending to the Margins: Writing, Researching, and Teaching on the Front Lines. Michelle Hall Kells and Valerie Balester, Eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999. 74-90.

"Do we really want students to 'bridge' the gap [between academic discourse and their everyday language], to learn to use 'our' language with confidence and fluency? Do instructors really want to invite students to become members of the academic community, their membership signified by competence in the same kinds of linguistics behaviors that we ourselves employ?" (78).

Shepherd, Valerie. Language variety and the art of the everyday. London: Pinter, 1990.

"Choice of language is available--if we acknowledge its availability and when necessary and appropriate take its opportunity. The artist, by definition, takes the opportunity. But it is not closed to the rest of us" (xi).

Young, Art, "Writing Poetry in First-Year Composition Courses." Teaching Composition. 2 April 2000 (http://auth.mhhe.com/socscience/english/tc/young.htm).

"I still hear complaints from professors and from people in business about the writing done by alumni of our first-year composition program and our institution's degree programs. While there is no mandate for colleges to train more professional poets, more flexibility and sensibility in writing and more 'creative' thinking, problem-solving, and language use would be most welcome."

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