During our interview, Dr. Steve Sherwood of the W.L. Adams Center of Writing at TCU claimed that Vershawn Ashanti Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own English?” made the single most convincing argument for non-standardized English in academic writing that he
Reading: Marjorie Agosin’s “Always Living in Spanish” and “English”
Marjorie Agosin is a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College as well as an essayist, poet, and human rights activist. In the essay “Always Living in Spanish,” translated by Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman, and the poem “English,” translated by Monic Bruno, Agosin
Reading: Min-Zhan Lu’s “From Silence to Words”
“My mother withdrew into silence two months before she died. A few nights before she fell silent, she told me she regretted the way she had raised me and my sisters. I knew she was referring to the way he
Reading: James Baldwin’s “If Black English Isn’t a Language”
In this opinion piece, James Baldwin makes a cogent, well-reasoned, and passionate argument that Black English, or African American Vernacular English, is a language. Not a dialect, but a language. He begins by chronicling various reasons for languages to arise—the need
Reading: June Jordan’s “Nobody Mean More to Me”
In “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan,” poet, essayist, and activist June Jordan, argues for the legitimacy of Black English, now often referred to as African American Vernacular English, by intertwining two
Textbook: Reading Culture
Reading Culture, edited by Diana George and John Trimbur, was the first textbook I used and is used throughout Emerson College’s First-Year Writing Program. Based on George and Trimbur’s backgrounds in rhetoric and composition, the reader comes from a social-epistemic
Activity: SEAE Freewrite and Discussion
Often, translingual courses will critically engage with genres of academic writing by complicating the idea that “Standard Edited American English” is a neutral, unmarked discourse. While undergraduate students probably haven’t been asked to consider the conventions and underlying assumptions of
Reading: Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
“So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language.” —Gloria Anzaldua, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”