The Standards of Writing (part 2)

As I’ve been saying, the standard’s form is an accident of history. Whichever group had the money, power, and education was always going to be the group that wrote. From the spoken dialect of the wealthy, educated group came the written standard because only the wealthy (and, I should add, the educated priests) had the luxury to write about issues of knowledge and culture. As I implied earlier, the formation of the standard was not a conspiracy to subjugate the masses; the conspiracy was not to allow the masses to learn the standard.

(I admit this is an oversimplification of history; however, these early circumstances are much overlooked in composition studies, where we tend to write as though no one wrote in English before the 19th century.)

Anyway. In my mind, the most democratic and egalitarian thing we can do is to teach the English grapholect to those who haven’t learned it, and to make them comfortable reading and writing it. Learning this grapholect opens up a million doors—to the English (and translated) traditions of philosophy, theology, biology, sociology, physics, history, economics . . . in a word, the English academic tradition. By ignoring or denigrating the standard grapholect, we ignore or denigrate everything that has been written in it. By placing emphasis on student vernaculars or varieties, which typically do not have written traditions and have not been used to accumulate knowledge across time and space, then we simply reenact the elite conspiracy of keeping the masses uneducated.

Two final qualifications:

First, I am not denying that the vernacular can be written. Of course it can be, and to great effect. Where would Faulkner or Morrison be without the written vernacular? The point is, when writers write the vernacular, typically they do it in an artistic context and, more importantly, after having mastered the standard grapholect.

Second, by defending the standard, I am not denigrating students’ languages. C.S. Lewis spent his life mastering Greek, Latin, and Old English, dead languages which have only a written form; so he spoke with authority when he proclaimed (and denounced himself by proclaiming) that the truest mark of a great language learner is an ability to master the spoken vernacular. I agree with him 100%. Enforcing a written standard in the classroom has nothing to do with disrespecting a student’s spoken dialect.