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Here’s a story language as a political football, race and linguistic prescriptivism. It’s a long thread, but I think it’s worth setting out here as a case study in the use and abuse of information during a culture war.
I was alerted to all this by a generous tweet from the NYT book critic - referencing my book about language https://twitter.com/parul_sehgal/status/1285991671096922115?s=20
I searched for the thread she was referring to https://twitter.com/thomaschattwill/status/1285910253788372992?s=20 and found what appeared to be an updated version of the “Ebonics controversy”.
If you don’t know what that is, in 1996 the Oakland school board passed a resolution saying it would use African American Vernacular English (AAVE, or “Ebonics”) in the classroom as an aid to teaching standard American English
(The latter is a loose term for the prestige variety of English used in newspapers, most books, on TV, by politicians and in classrooms.)
Cue a “political correctness gone mad” row of massive proportions.
Misapprehending the Oakland school board’s intentions, pundits raged against the fact that “slang” and “bad language” was being taught instead of “proper English” out of exaggerated respect for progressive sensibilities.
(AAVE is a variety of English, like Scots, or Australian English, or British English. It’s not “slang” and it is not “bad language”.)
Anyway, back to the present. The article the tweet links to is headlined “Rutgers English Department to deemphasize traditional grammar ‘in solidarity with Black Lives Matter’”, and describes an email sent by the Department Chair to staff and students.
This sounds like Rutgers is going stop teaching students how to write well and allow a free-for all in which essays and assignments in “slang” are encouraged. Another erosion of standards in the service of political correctness, right? It’s 1996 all over again.
Except that if you read even that heavily slanted “report” into the email you’ll see something is really wrong with this account. First, it’s the Graduate Writing Program we’re talking about, not general undergraduate education.
The GWR’s aim is to help students “develop professional writing habits and learn how to write effectively across several important scholarly genres: abstracts, literature reviews”. It’s a training unit for advanced students.
OK, but it’d still need to teach them traditional English grammar, right? Otherwise all those journal abstracts will be in slang! Well, what does the email actually say?
It says that, in response to current events, and among other initiatives, the GWR will go about “Incorporating ‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy...
...This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard ‘academic’ English backgrounds at a disadvantage.”
Yes. Read that again. It is the opposite of what the headline said. The rules of grammar will *not* be de-emphasised so as to avoid putting off students from diverse backgrounds.
Instead “critical grammar”, which as far as I can tell is derived from a 2011 PhD thesis by one Sarah Stanley, “encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them...
...in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on ‘written’ accents.”
It’s hard to say from that summary precisely what that would mean in practice, but it sounds like the aim is to equip students with knowledge of traditional grammar alongside knowledge of other varieties.
That sounds eminently reasonable. And, in any case, it’s a stretch to imagine that a Graduate Writing Program’s decision to tweak its pedagogical framework is going to have much of an effect on anything, let alone “the culture”.
In any case, remember, the GWR says it’s going to be doing the opposite of what many have claimed based on a misleading write-up.
Language is so closely connected to our sense of ourselves that it’s often a lightning rod for strong feelings that are actually about other things.
It’s a shame that Rutgers’ email has been misrepresented, and it’s sad that the many people now sharing the article in righteous anger are doing so without looking beyond the headline.
A cynic might say they’re more interested in confirming their priors than finding out what’s actually going on. Which is exactly what happened in Oakland in 1996.
And in doing so they’re convincing others that something is happening which isn’t, fuelling a cycle of outrage in the process - which can’t be in anyone’s interests./ENDS
