RRR: Hendickson, "Talking in Color"

In the personal essay “Talking in Color: Collision of Cultures” (2013), Tiffany Hendrickson explains how your speech is not defined by your ethnicity but by the culture you were raised in. Hendrickson uses personal experiences as well as quotes from different authors to support her claim. Hendrickson tells the story of how it was for her being a white female who spoke with an African-American dialect in order to help people understand that your ethnicity doesn’t define your speech. The attended audience of this essay is for people who often believe that speech is ethnicity specific as well as people who are like the author and may be embarrassed because they feel they should talk a certain way because of their ethnicity.

I agree with the message Hendrickson was trying to teach in this article. I feel like her being a white girl experiencing the same struggle as black people was really different to me. However, I still liked the way she made it her own in a way  to not only appeal to African American people, while still speaking the truth about the struggle. She did a really good job getting her point across about coding.

In the article, "Talking in Color: Collision of Cultures", the author talks about how people used to judge her based off of what she sounded or looked like. So she learned how to code-switch in order to communicate without being judged. For example, "As I wait for the bus, the white faces rushing into school look at me quizzically because I am not walking into their school." (Hendrickson, paragraph 1) This shows that the other white kids used to judge her because she was white but she didn't go to a white school. According to the text, "I tried to hide my black voice or any accent that I might have. I would try to “code-switch” with the group I was talking to." (Hendrickson, paragraph 7)  This explains how she changed her way of speaking when interacting with other white people. This story is a great example of how some people who will be judged, on the way they speak, can change the way they speak to interact with different groups of people without judgement. Code-switching is a necessary skill that people should have no matter what race or ethnicity they are.

Work Cited
  Hendrickson, Tiffany. “First-Year Writers.” Queen City Writers, Queen City Writers, 15 Aug. 2014, qc-writers.com/2013/03/21/storming-the-gate-talking-in-color/.                                                 

RRR:Larson, "Watch Your Language: Teaching Standard Usage to Resistant and Reluctant Learners"

In the English journal "Watch Your Language"(1996), written by Mark Larson explores the idea that English teachers should come up with a more effective way to teach students language. He use personal experience to connect with the readers in a way that lets them know, he too know the struggle of non effective teaching methods. The purpose of this article is to get the attention of English teachers in order to reform the way English is being taught, and helping students improve their English skills. The attended audience for this article is English teachers, concerned students or parents, and people that experienced the same struggle as the writer.

I personally agree with Larson. In the story, he too struggles with the proper way to use English in writing. I can personally relate to this. As a kid writing was never my strongest area. I had my writing skills and knowledge drilled into me by my mother and the many books I've read over the years. I was also delighted to read that the author tried to correct his teachings in order to compensate for the same reasons he struggled with English. Seeing that my teachers never did this for me, I am both happy and intrigued in the ways he wanted to reform the way English and his class was taught.

In this article Larson uses personal experiences, both in his childhood and adult years, along with quotes from different sources to illustrate his point that teaching English should be more about the context of your writing over just teaching the “so called” rules of grammar. Larson states, “They know the rules, though they probably never think of them as rules” (Larson, 94). Here Larson explains how there are different rules to any language including “street slang” that we unconsciously learn without knowing. We talk this way to make our point to that audience. Larson does a great job in helping the reader relate to the point of the rules can be learned without teaching them.  He correlates learning grammar rules and being corrected on mistakes with fitting in to different groups and how constantly being penalized or corrected can make you feel more like an outsider. This hinders the learner process because the feeling would make you rebellious. He gives an example of this by telling a personal story about a dinner he attended where he felt like an outsider and how even someone trying to help me made him more uncomfortable and more willing to rebel. “Her well-meaning effort to help me feel “at home” only accentuated my status as an alien, as someone in need of guidance” (Larson,92). This story is a great example of how some feel in the classroom when they are constantly being corrected on grammatical errors it makes them feel like an outsider as if they don’t know language at all, which in turns causes students to focus to much on the rules and not enough on the context of their speech.  “I would like to take the primary focus off of prescriptive rules – what we “ought” to say-and place it on descriptive rules-what people do say” (Pinker,371). This was a great quote used by Larson to explain how he believes language should be taught. He believes learning how people speak and why the speak certain ways would be more beneficial than learning how we should speak. By reading works by different people we unconsciously learn the rules of language and how to speak to different audiences without being instructed directly. Larson does a great job with opening the eyes of the reader, by explaining his point that too much emphasize has been put on the rules of language and we need to focus more on the context of our speech.

Larson, Mark. “Watch Your Language: Teaching Standard Usage to Resistant and Reluctant

            Learners.” The English Journal, vol. 85, no. 7, 1996, pp. 91–95. JSTOR, JSTOR,

            www.jstor.org/stable/820518.

Pinker, Steven. 1995. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: W

            Morrow and Company.