taylorcate
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5 years ago Basic Writing Response Paper
Working at the writing center during my undergraduate career exposed me to all types of individuals who need an equal variety of help and instruction. Whether it was ESL students or adult students struggling to form cohesive thoughts in writing, our doors were always open and, without the instructors and teachers who took hours in the center, those students would have been left behind in the mix of student turnover that institutions without writing centers face every year. These teachers’ approach to correcting pre-conditioned writing behaviors was, usually, to begin identifying error patterns across sentences to show the systemic nature of grammar misuse. Rather than start reading the work and identifying one issue at a time, the more efficient method, described by Shaugnessy throughout Errors and Expectations, is to scan the piece and identify multiples of errors with similar patterns to show which innate and conditioned errors permeate the structure and logic of the student’s thinking. Lu’s initial defense of Shaugnessy’s argument posits her as an advocate of essentialist BW pedagogy, and later she agrees with Shaugnessy that converting individuals’ diverse writing styles to “good English” may do more harm than good. That constantly correcting these individuals’ language “errors” asks them to abandon language customs learned from parents, family, and community instead of simply teach them how to write better. I, even in my security and ease of writing from the start, noticed this whenever I would phone home from college. My language, then depictive of a suburban, white girl from Pennsylvania, quickly morphed to that of a British Literature Scholar wanna-be who, without thinking, would talk over the heads of almost anyone she encountered. It wasn’t my fault, per se, but I was gaining language so fast that I did not understand yet how to choose when and where to use it.
My father gave me a great bit of advice when I was growing up that I’ll never forget. Always, when you are speaking to someone, you must leave them with their dignity. If you ever intend to get something out of someone or get them to cooperate with whatever you’re doing, you must ensure that you don’t begin the process by making that person feel stupid. Once they feel stupid or unable, they will become defensive and willfully unable of taking in instruction. He learned this working as a State Trooper, but I witnessed this first hand in the writing center all those years. Whenever a professor there was patient, used kind words, smiled at the student, or just made them feel welcome, the session always went better than when a student came in and immediately had their insecurities thrown at them. I try to approach most things in my life with this motto playing in the background and I have found, generally, people respond to it.
“Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence”