Unit 1

Abby Bustin

Mrs. O’toole

WRT 105

9 November 2020

Societies Language 

Throughout the year, reading and listening to all these writings, I view everything in a very different way. Our studies in this class have brought major perspective in my life and have helped me to become more open minded. 

A quote from What is Literacy said “Writing teachers such as David Bartholome and Partricia Bizzell argue that a writer’s persona is socially constructed, which means that the literacy situation shapes a composer’s persona.” (pg. 14). Persona usually is directly connected to the language we use. Language can be anything from Black English and White English, to code switching and tone of voice. 

One of the major pieces we worked with was the TED talk My Voice My Choice by Jaylene Clark Owens. She is a very educated black woman. She addresses how it’s unacceptable that people are so apt to code switch nowadays. Instead of using these socially acceptable voices that don’t show true background or true self,  the people in her culture need to start using their natural, powerful, amazing voices. This TED talk brings up how we are conditioned to talk in a certain way and how we code switch regularly depending on the circumstances we encounter. Society has continuously trained us to use our socially acceptable, nicer sounding voices, that we do it automatically. Jaylene Clark Owens says “I wonder if my voice is so high you can't hear the irony. I do it automatically, I just pop this voice in without thinking.”(0:41). She asks, “Why can’t the voice you use with an employer, be the same one you use with your husband?”(1:02). The answer is, the literacy situation you are in entails a lot of factors. These can be the role you play, your audience, the message you are trying to send, and the social and cultural contexts.

We see this all the time in everyday life. For example in politics or at home. We see in political debates that the people put on a persona and use a type of language that makes them sound more professional and stern. The politicians need to stand their ground while continuing to sound intelligent in the debate. The composer’s audience shapes the message they give out. For example in the presidential debate they conversed on the topic of the COVID-19 pandemic. Joe Biden altered the language he was using, his power, and his tone of voice. He recognized his audience and he changed his persona. This is what a literate person does. Everyone does it. I recognize it in myself. At home with my family or my friends, I can be  myself and use my true tone of voice. This is because I’m comfortable and familiar with them. Versus at work where my whole persona changes. I am very thoughtful with what I say and I try to be very bubbly and helpful towards the customers. I witness changes in tone of voice all the time. Whether it’s my mom talking to her students with a high pitched happy voice, or my dad being really professional and formal on the phone. I adjust my tone of voice and the language I use on the phone all the time. If I’m texting my friends I use abbreviations and I’m not as professional as I would be on the phone with my boss. These are mediums and modes. What Is Literacy says “Mediums and modes are closely related. If a mode is a channel of communication- oral, visual, digital, print- then a medium is the tool that the composer uses within that channel to deliver his or her message.” (pg. 16). Mediums and modes are evolving significantly nowadays and being literate means being able to work with these changes. 

Another major piece we worked with was the TED talk The Danger Of A Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. One of the main lines she says in her TED talk was this “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” (13:11) This says a lot in terms of stories. From the untrue stories, to the ones we choose to believe, to the real stories. She says “So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that’s what they become.” (9:26). This happens to many different cultures. If someone doesn’t take the time to truly understand a group of people, they will just believe what a story they saw told them. They will become one-sided. Chimamanda is guilty of creating a single story of Mexicans. In her TED talk she says “I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans, and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.” (9:12) Everyone is guilty of stereotyping others. As a society we need to move toward understanding all aspects of each other and taking into account what others have to say. 

Society needs to accept that being literate comes in many different contexts through many different lifestyles. We as people need to embrace what makes us unique and we need to display who we truly are.

Works Cited

Melzer, Dan, and Deborah Coxwell-Teague. “Everything's a Text.” Yonkers Public Schools, Longman, 2011, https://www.yonkerspublicschools.org/cms/lib/NY01814060/Centricity/Domain/2413/SUPA%20Melzer.Chap%201pdf.pdf.

Clark Owens, Jaylene. “My Voice My Choice.” Youtube, Button Poetry, 14 February 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24URwA3Y544&t=63s.

Ngozi Adichie, Chimamanda. “The Danger Of A Single Story.” Youtube, TED, 7 October 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg&t=938s.

Creative Writing 

Abby Bustin SUPA Writing

Zak Ebrahim, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jaylene Clark Owens, and I were on our way to a concert. We were singing along to the radio and suddenly we heard a radio show. The talk show people were talking about how they are guilty of stereotyping, but how everyone unconsciously stereotypes other people. Chimamanda starts telling us a story about her as a kid.

“So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor...Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed rafia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.”

“Growing up in a bigoted household, I wasn’t prepared for the real world. I’d been raised to judge people based on arbitrary measurements, like a person's race or religion.”

People judge based on arbitrary measurements all the time. People label black women as angry black women just because of the tone in their voice. 

There is stereotyping all the time like people believing Black English is bad. Why? Because it makes you sound ghetto, uneducated I don't think that’s a big mystery Ghetto? That is a leftover ancestral sound from the clicking languages found in the Southern African Tribes that is my history. 

“My roommate had a single story of Africa. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in anyway, no possibility of feeling  more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals”

Human equals, Yeah, “I kept my identity a secret from my classmates, to avoid being targeted.” 

My father was a terrorist and people thought they saw in me the same destruction my father was capable of. 

“One day toward the end of this convention I went to, I found out that one of the kids I had befriended was Jewish. Now, it had taken several days for this detail to come to light, but I realized that there was no natural animosity between the two of us. I had never had a Jewish friend before, and frankly I felt a sense of pride in having been able to overcome a barrier, that for most of my life I had been led to believe was insurmountable.”

“I’ve always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person, without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person.” 

Me- People often ignore the many great stories that compose a group of people. They tend to focus on the stereotypes and the made up single story of people. This happens all the time with the African American community. Chimamanda faces this first hand. 

Yeah. I have to suppress myself so that people can trust me. But this face is back 24/7 I can’t turn it on and off based on time and place.

“So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”

Harlem should not be indicative of your level of intelligence. Habitually we are told that our blackness cannot enter white spaces without code switching.

Believing that Harlem is indicative of level of intelligence is a form of stereotyping. “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.They make one story become the only story”

Exactly! “On a nightly basis Jon Stewart forced me to be intellectually honest with myself about my own bigotry, and he helped me realize that a person’s race, religion, or sexual orientation had nothing to do with the quality of one's character.” 

“Because of that, I was able to contrast the stereotypes I’d been taught as a child with real life experience and interaction.” 

“What this demonstrates I think is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children.” 

“But I must quickly add that I too, am just as guilty in the question of the single story.” 8:20

“I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans, and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.” 

“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”

The definitive story of Muslims is that we are always involved with violence and crime but “I stand here as proof that violence isn’t inherent in one's religion or race.” 

“There are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important to talk about them.” 

“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.”

“It's been my experience that when people take the time to interact with one another, it doesn't take long to realize that for the most part, we all want the same things out of life.” 

Zak Ebrahim- “I Am The Son Of A Terrorist” 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie- “The Danger Of A Single Story”

Jaylene Clark Owens- “My Voice, My Choice” 

Free Write Post 

June Jordan Free Write Post Oct 19th

"Nobody Mean More To Me Than You And The Future Life Of Willie Jordan" written by June Jordan, a Jamaican American activist, seems to be about a college classroom and the differences between Standard English and Black English, but it may also be about the injustices in the system, police brutality, and the influences of Black English in society as a whole. In June Jordan's essay, her overall goal is to talk about how change needs to happen with the ideals regarding Black and Standard English. Her writing is all about how, instead of just believing what history has taught us, and us allowing Black English to just be homogenized. We need to embrace the different dialects in English and realize that these different dialects are what make languages/people unique. She is trying to spark change in the mindsets of people all over the world with certain cultural backgrounds. June Jordan starts this mindset change with the students in her Black English class. June Jordan complicates my understanding of English courses in many interesting ways. In American schooling we've always been taught pretty one sidedly and straight to the point. Where in her English course it's changing with the evolving languages. She teaches her kids to be aware of issues in society, and through the book "The Color Purple", she's teaching her students that Black English isn't unacceptable or any less than White English. In "What is Literacy", it talked about how being literate doesn't just mean being able to read and write, it means being able to communicate in different forms and to accept differences of languages. Just because Black English doesn't sound like Standard English we were taught all our lives, doesn't mean Standard English is the only way to be literate. Another text I think connected ideals with "Nobody Mean More To Me Than You And The Future Life Of Willie Jordan" was "Dangers Of A Single Story" video. There is one sentence that stood out to me that truly displays Americans' Single Story about Black English. It says "correct Black English could be achieved only by striving for incorrect Standard English." This is so misleading and not true. We learn that in order to become literate we need to alter our single story, become more diverse, and accept our unique differences in dialects of English.

Summary Heuristic

Summary Heuristic

As our syllabus course description makes clear, composing always involves critical engagement with the ideas and opinions of others, and these ideas and opinions often come to us through careful reading. What does it mean to read carefully and critically? Slowing down and engaging with the texts we read is one important part of this, but it’s equally important to think “rhetorically” about the texts we encounter. In order to develop your rhetorical reading skills and practice developing your own engagement with the reading you do, you’ll be writing summaries of the texts you encounter. 

For each of the shared texts (as well as the texts you find through research) respond to the following prompts:

Background/Context (name, title, date of publication, place or site of publication, anything you discover about the composer/s)

June Jordan, Nobody Mean More to Me Than You And the Future Life of Willie Jordan, August 1988, ProQuest Psychology Journals, she is a poet, essayist, activist, and teacher who is passionate about using Black English in her writings. She teaches people to use language as an outlet for expressing their culture. In her work she explores issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation. 

Genre (what is the genre of the text? what are the genre conventions of the text?)

Narrative is the genre. The genre convention is the composer telling stories about the lessons in her college class and what was going on in Willie Jordan's life. 

Aims/Methods/Materials (what are the composers attempting to do in the text and how are they doing it?)

The writer, June Jordan, is attempting to convey the importance of the differences being intensified between the different dialects of English. She stresses the effects of these dialects being homogenized through people's ideas and mass media. She wants everyone to strive for change and to embrace these diversities called Black and White English. 

Flashpoints & Keywords/Concepts (record three quotes that resonate with you and any keywords or concepts that circulate in the text—keywords or concepts that repeat, or seem significant, or connect with our unit 1 project) 

“ How best to serve the memory of Reggie Jordan ? Should we use the language of the killer-  Standard English- in order to make our ideas acceptable to those controlling the killers? But wouldn’t what we had to say be rejected, summarily, if we said it in our own language, the language of the victim, wouldn’t that mean our suicide on top of Reggie’s murder?  But if we expressed ourselves in our own language wouldn’t that be suicidal to the wish to communicate with those who, evidently, do not give a damn about us/ Reggie/ police violence in the Black community?” (pg 97)

“FOR WE AIN’T STAYIN’ SILENT NO MORE.” (pg. 95)

“If we insisted that the language of Black English adheres to a distinctive Black syntax , then we are postulating a profound difference between White and Black people.” (pg 92)

Key Words: White Standard English, Black English., police, standards, culture, language, syntax, murderers.

Key Concepts: Eliminate/ never use .... of Black English,  there is culture behind the Englishes, Diversity should not be homogenized. 

Audience (who is the target audience? How do you know? How is the audience shaping the choices the writer is making?

There are multiple target audiences of June Jordans piece. White people who use White Standard English, Black people who use Black English, Police Officers, and the Society of Willie Jordan’s family. Also students reading her piece in school to be informed about the subject are an audience as well. I know because her writing is pretty straight forward to  people using set stone languages in certain cultures. I also know because the letter they wrote in class, as well as Willie’s letter in the ending are directly talking to the police system and Willie’s society. The audience shapes June Jordan’s writing choices because she chose to talk relevantly to certain groups of people, she doesn’t talk about  just anything.

Two sentence summary (how would you summarize this text in 2 sentences for someone outside our class—a parent, for example, or a college student studying something similar but who has not encountered this text? What information seems most important to include? What can you leave out?)

Nobody mean more to me than you and the future life of Willie Jordan written by June Jordan, a Jamaican American activist, seems to be about a college classroom and the differences between White Standard English and Black English, but it may also be about the injustices in the system, police brutality, and the influences of Black English in society as a whole. 

Group Work

Definitions 

Audience: who is consuming the content

Persona: how you act depending on the social context and situation

Genre: the kind, sort, or style marked by the content and situation

Genre System: The elements and texts working together to make up a genre, like a network

Social and Cultural Context: How the composer’s experiences influence their work 

Medium and Mode: Mode is a channel of communication and the medium is the tool the composer uses within that channel to deliver the message.

Multiple Literacies: A literate person is able to compose in multiple modes, genres, and kinds of texts for multiple audiences or contexts.

Who typically or historically holds the power to make the rules of the genres? White men

Why does genre matter? To know what you’re reading and to organize pieces of information

What does being aware of genre enable us to do? To be better informed of the pieces you’re reading

Why does playing with or reshaping genre matter? Genre should evolve with how our communication is evolving, genres need to include not just reading certain types of books but also including different mediums and modes through our media that we are involved with present day.

What does this reshaping enable us to do? Evolve what we are writing and reading and do more with that information

What are the risks involved? Drifting too far from the original genre

 

Genre is a complex idea that helps us understand what we’re reading and organize pieces of literature. You can simplify it down to the kind, sort, or style marked by the content and situation in which it occurs. This means that genre is affected by the audience, persona, social and cultural context, medium and mode. Being aware of genre enables us to be better informed on the pieces we’re reading. Historically, white men have held the power to define the genres, but this is changing. The definition of genre is also changing, and this is important because it should evolve with our evolving communication and media. Reshaping genres allows us to evolve what we are writing and reading to fit the social context. However, there is a risk that we will drift too far away from the original piece.

College Essay

Kids Are My Inspiration 

There were two significant events in my life that taught me really memorable lessons that I live by to this day.

I was in 5th grade at Bear Road Elementary. Every morning I would walk in and say hi to my friends and the teacher. We would then take our seats. When we worked individually, I would always notice this one girl named Bryanna. She would have a teacher right next to her helping her with her lessons. The kids in my class would  stare at her, wondering why she wasn't doing the same as the rest of us. I found what she was doing so intriguing. She would be doing some sort of art, whether it was coloring or drawing little pictures. One day her personal teacher wasn't there and she looked pretty lonely, like she needed someone's extra help.

A little later our teacher put us into groups. I wondered why Bryanna wasn't placed in a group. I wanted to get to know her, so I walked up to her and told her how cool I thought her art was. She had the biggest smile on her face after I complimented her. I told her how our red hair was like a super power and how we could rule the world with it. She giggled. After that she knew she could trust me. I asked the teacher if it was okay if I invited her into my group. I thought it was so awesome that I was her new helper and her new friend! Later, when I was home from school I couldn't stop telling my parents about my day with Bryanna. I was so happy! 

This internal feeling of wanting to help others carried on a couple of years later into camp counseling last summer. I was so enthusiastic about being able to work with kids all day in the summer. On the first day we split up into work groups. I volunteered for the art section. As I was walking around helping the kids with their crafts, a girl named Natalie asked me to tie her bracelet. I sat down next to her and told her how pretty I thought it was. I said that I always used to make friendship bracelets when I was a little girl. She thought it was awesome we had something in common.

Later that day I was in charge of the little kids group. Natalie was the youngest kid in the older group. She didn’t fit in as well with the older kids. At lunch, a bunch of the camp counselors told me she was being very troublesome. She came walking into lunch really upset because she was forced to sit out of a few games due to her misbehavior. All of the counselors were very frustrated with Natalie. 

I noticed her sitting alone. I didn’t appreciate everyone's attitudes towards her so I went up to invite her to sit with me. At first she thought I was coming over to scold her. She didn't want to hear it. She then realized I had good intentions and sat with me. We were talking about what was going on and how I was trying to understand her side of the story. I think she just needed someone to talk to. She told me it’s been hard at home and that her parents are separated. She doesn’t get along with her step dad, and her parents barely pay attention to her. Since she had shared that with me, I became the only camp counselor she would listen to and the only one she trusted. 

These two times in my life taught me that you never know what people are going through. Always try to be kind and uplifting to one another because in the end, we are all just here to support each other and to grow together. 

Free Write Post

Literacy is Everywhere Sept 20th

Literacy has many different meanings, not just one simple definition. Everything we do is a form of literacy. From listening to music, to texting our friends, to doing school work. Literacy happens in several forms and it changes with its audiences. In Everything's A Text, they talk about how composers adjust their tone of voice for different audiences. They used Malcom X as an example. When he was talking to the Detroit Civil Rights group he used very conversational and informal language. For the Harvard audience, Malcom X used a formal dialect of English. This goes hand in hand with real life. At home with my family and around my friends, I can be myself and use my true tone of voice because I'm familiar and comfortable with them. At work my whole persona changes. I am very thoughtful with what I say and I try to be very bubbly and helpful towards the customers. I see changes in tone of voice all around me. Whether it's my mom talking to her students with a higher pitched happy voice, or my dad being really professional and formal on the phone. Adapting in certain surroundings is a form of literacy and people do it all the time subconsciously. This is what Jaylene and Jamila spoke on in their videos. The fact that they have to code switch all the time depending on who they're surrounded by. These black women put on their higher pitched, unnatural voice  just to seem more credible or more professional. They are so used to hiding their deemed "ghetto" voice but now they embrace it and realize that it is natural and beautiful. It comes from way within their ancestry. Society needs to accept that being literate comes in many different contexts throughout many different lifestyles and that we need to embrace what makes us unique and who we truly are.