Say it your way! But do it perfectly. And everyone needs to understand what you’ve said.
One of the joys of being an academic is working with a wide range of people as a writing coach, from undergraduates and PhD candidates I supervise to peers and co-authors, much of my work involves finding ways to communicate effectively and helping others to learn to do it as well.
As my opening line suggests, however, this idea of communicating as a form of authentic personal expression can often clash with the demand to ensure that your communication is perspicuous, that is, easy for others to understand. The more I learn and think about human neuro- and cultural diversity the more acute this challenge seems to me. The most obvious form of inability in human communication can be seen in those contexts where we can communicate perfectly well in one human language, but simply cannot understand another. We talk about fluency when it comes to language. But fluency also exists in forms of dialects, albeit more covertly. Especially since moving to the UK, where there is a wider range of English dialects which are aligned with different levels of social class and attainment, I’ve realised that communication in a common language can be fraught and complicated with unintentional or unanticipated forms of misunderstanding.
Does good writing transcend particularities and reach for a “canonical” or standard form of a language? Much of the infrastructure of the modern University suggests this is the case (see my post on marking, for example). But generic communication prevents us from achieving some levels of texture and nuance in communication, this is why forms of vernacular speech can communicate so much more, and many poets have privileged vernacular as a source of truth in particularity. It’s also the case that the confidence we can gain from working within so-called standards, is undeserved, simply forcing others to conceal their lack of understanding and far too often “canon” is simply another word for exclusive privilege. One can be multi-lingual, as an alternative, working with a variety of forms of language, and even seeking to learn the languages of the other persons you communicate with.
I’ve been toying with this myself lately, noticing forms of self-policing that are part of my writing process. I was taught to be cautious with pronouns, one might suggest. Lecturers drew red lines through contractions, informal, and colloquial forms of speech. I remember one paper I received back as an undergraduate with “coll.” written in the margins throughout. This is where I first learned the word colloquial. I’ve been glad to learn to be more reflective and intentional in my use of gendered pronouns (see the fantastic piece by my colleague Nick Adams in SJT on this subject for more!). I learned to make my use of metaphors more forensic, closed down, and available for easy interpretation for readers. And, when writing theologically, I was taught to for chains of citation to pristinate and authorise my insights. I’ve begun to contest these moves deliberately in my writing. You’ll notice that my journal articles have contractions strewn throughout. I’ve begun writing articles with only light use of citation (in the case where an idea from a colleague does require responsible attribution). Some of my writing takes the form of creative fiction or poetry, and not as a joke, but situated as serious scholarly reflection albeit in an unexpected genre. But these can’t be published in scholarly journals, so I publish them as preprints and blog posts.
It’s interesting to think about what this experimental turn into deliberately vernacular speech means for our work as writing coaches. We want our students to be taken seriously, and perhaps this requires deference to “standard English” but I’m becoming increasingly concerned that doing this task well, especially in the context of the assessment of student writing, is an extension of toxic regimes of behaviour modification and cultural erasure. I’ll correct someone’s grammar if I can tell they’re trying to achieve a certain genre and it’s clear to both of us what the rules are in that genre. But if someone wants to step outside the conventional genre? I’ll meet you there.