Language, Privilege, and the First-Year College Writing Course
All first-year composition instructors should read “Authority and American Usage” by David Foster Wallace, not because he’s right, but because the essay, first published in 2001 under a different title and later in 2005’s Consider the Lobster, raises still-relevant questions about the roles language plays in determining success, failure, and access to privilege and power.
The piece could be quoted in its entirety, give or take a few footnotes. But the part most worth discussing comes where Wallace presents the speech he delivers, individually and in private, to “certain black students who [are] (a) bright and inquisitive as hell and (b) deficient in what US higher education considers written English facility.” To keep things short, I’m condensing it, without, I hope, robbing it of its force or its meaning:
I don’t know whether anybody’s told you this or not, but when you’re in a college English class you’re basically studying a foreign dialect. This dialect is called Standard Written English [SWE]. … [T]he good news [is not] that you’re a bad writer, it’s that you haven’t learned the special rules of the dialect. … [The bad news is that] I’m not going to let you write in [your dialect]. In my class, you have to learn and write in SWE. … And…I am going to make you. (108–109)
There’s still room for debate about Wallace’s attitude, approach, and diction. Words like insensitive and out-of-touch would probably dominate it. In fact, one of his students filed a complaint against him with the college, saying that she was (these are her professor’s words) “especially traumatized by” the claim that he would “make” her learn SWE. In retrospect, Wallace shows some understanding of the pain his words caused. But his admission that his last line “was indeed a rhetorical boner” reads as a further minimization of his student’s perspective (117).
To the red-faced and shrill Apologetic Chorus’s “Those were different times! You can’t judge a man by what he said back then,” I respond: Yes, sure, of course. Who can blame someone writing in 1861 — excuse me [checks notes] — 2001 for not knowing any better?
But the fact, however unfortunate, remains that his cluelessness and bluntness notwithstanding, Wallace’s underlying message is persuasive, if not exactly demonstrably proven. It goes something like this: Americans fluent in SWE, regardless of their primary dialect, have a greater chance of mobility and economic success. Wallace believed it was his duty to deliver this message clearly and candidly. To do otherwise, in his view, would have been a disservice to his students:
[My] own humble [sic?] opinion is that some of the cultural and political realities of American life are themselves racially insensitive and elitist and offensive and unfair, and that pussyfooting around these realities with euphemistic doublespeak is not only hypocritical but toxic to the project of ever really changing them. (109)
There’s a paradox at work here. In his vague, half-assed, and perhaps even spurious calls to undermine the system from within, Wallace is simultaneously upholding it. And aside from addressing the issue with his student and then in “Authority and American Usage,” he didn’t contribute much “to the project of ever really changing” anything. Rather, as Arvind Dilawar observes, he “takes a reactionary stance, joining the chorus bemoaning social justice as ‘political correctness,’” and in “caricatur[ing] efforts to make language more inclusive or less discriminatory,” Wallace blinds himself to “the significance of language as power itself.” This is a catastrophic failure for a writer of his rank.
Wallace’s argument, though, isn’t unique to him. It dominated the English classes he’d taken, it cast its long shadow over mine when I was in college (at the same time “Authority” was written [I accepted it]), and it’s still being made today, including in institutional and governmental policy.
In Texas, where I teach, colleges that receive state funding must show that their students are meeting specific outcomes. In first-year composition, one of those outcomes is to “[u]se Edited American English [EAE] in academic essays.” But the manual this comes from doesn’t define EAE (the term is used only once in the entire 257-page document) and a guide on it doesn’t exist elsewhere. According to Richard Nordquist, EAE is a variant of SWE. The difference between the two, though, isn’t clear, and the foremost guide on SWE was published in 1998, hasn’t been updated since, and is currently out-of-stock on Amazon.
As a first-year writing teacher, then, I’m left more or less on my own, making value judgments about my students’ work on a case-by-case basis, guided by little more than my own education, preferences, and prejudices. The decisions I make, often arbitrarily, about my students’ writing can have significant and detrimental impacts on not only their grades but also their self-identities and futures.
Most of the students I teach don’t have plans to become academics, and I don’t blame them. Their goals in pursuing an education are realistic and, ultimately, economically driven: they want meaningful, well paying jobs as nurses, mechanics, IT professionals, and business leaders, among others. As someone who’s rooting for them, I’d like to think I understand the small role I can play in their success, both now and in years to come. This makes teaching first-year writing meaningful for me.
I’ve learned to start each term by appealing to my students’ desire to have good careers. It’s when I do this that I find them most engaged. Most of them are unaware that a cover letter is generally part of the job-application process, nor do they realize that they’ll likely be competing with dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of candidates for any given position. Having solid writing skills, first demonstrated in those cover letters, will give them an advantage going into the interview process. I’ll cite sources for them claiming that between 73 and 80% of employers are seeking effective writers. They may not think of themselves primarily as writers, but this doesn’t mean they can’t become good ones.
Having been convinced that they should take the course seriously, or at least having heard my best attempt to show them why they should, most students put in the effort required to get through it. They may never have to write another essay or use MLA Style after college, but the skills they develop in doing so — creating and supporting a thesis, locating and citing credible and relevant information, thinking critically about those sources (and about themselves), effectively communicating their ideas, and formatting to specific standards — are applicable to all career fields.
But as I read “Authority,” I couldn’t help but question my goals and overall approach, asking whether they differ, fundamentally, from Wallace’s, or whether I’m making the same basic argument he made to his students, just more kindly.
It seems so on the face of it. An impressive percentage of my students are the first in their families to attend college. The impact I have on them can be positive (some have said as much in course evaluations), but it can also be that of a prescriptive gatekeeper, denying access to opportunities to the ones who fail to meet my arbitrary standards of what EAE should look like (to say nothing of “Academic English,” which, to his credit, Wallace thoroughly and enjoyably dismantles in an aside). But it’s not just access I can provide my students with. It’s also validation, which was for me, as an undergraduate, what I needed most. Without that validation, I don’t think I would’ve completed my degree, much less gone on to do graduate work.
Lots of students (who, of course, don’t look like me) are still taught in primary and secondary school that their native dialect — or language — is insufficient, if not deficient. This lesson is often ingrained by the time they get to my class. I can either reinforce it, which requires little thought on my part, or I can practice what I preach by appreciating nuance.
For example, if in grading a piece of writing I encounter nouns like abuela and tío or contractions like I’ma, I can tell the student writer that the language they’re employing isn’t Standard and grade their work accordingly. Or I can use the usage as an opportunity for the student to reflect on their assumptions of their audience.
The latter, I hope, at least keeps the door open for dialogue. But even the raising of the question could be an assertion of my arbitrary linguistic authority. I want to ensure I’m not privileging one dialect or language over another but to draw attention to the fact that language can be used in different ways depending on the context — and that we have a better chance at successful communication when we apply this awareness and make effective rhetorical choices.
This isn’t, as Wallace (and others) would say, a matter of “pussyfooting around [linguistic] realities with euphemistic doublespeak.” It’s a matter, as Missy Watson writes, of “undoing” the damage done by “our own privileging of standardized English.” It’s a matter of respecting my students, meeting them where they’re at, and challenging them — and crucially, myself — to become better communicators, not by “making” anyone learn anything but by encouraging each other to think more deeply about how language works — and about our roles in those operations. In other words, it’s a matter of humility and openness whose sole purpose is mutual growth.
Creating a classroom environment where this can occur is what I aim for these days. Like all teachers, I’ve learned and I’m still learning through trial and error. The nature of college is changing, and with it, the first-year writing course. Students value it more when we adapt it to their realities, not vice versa. When this happens, trust is established, we all learn together, and their confidence builds up in ways they had never thought possible.
