Sample Introductions

Alvarez, Sara P., Eunjeong Lee, and Amy Wan. “Workin’ Languages: Who We Are Matters in Our Writing,” Writing Spaces, vol. 4, 2022, https://writingspaces.org/past-volumes/workin-languages-who-we-are-matters-in-our-writing/.

When you think about writing for school, you’re probably imagining composing “formal/academic writing” where you are trying to make yourself sound like an expert, putting on an objective “academic” tone that can often feel far removed from your own voice. You might have the experience of “cleaning up” your voice to make yourself sound “appropriate,” aware that people who read your writing might make assumptions about how much you know based on what words you use. Because you often move in and out of different languages (beyond English) or lingos—how you communicate with your best friend vs. how you communicate with your coworker at the local electronics store, for instance—you might be trying to filter out variations of your voice for those different ways of communicating. Doing this work, essentially trying to silence your voice, can be exhausting. And honestly, this reduction of your voice can make writing feel difficult, irrelevant, and monotone (aka boring).

The three of us, too, have wrestled with questions like, “How do I bring my own voice into academic writing,” and “How does who I am matter in my writing?” Over the years, we have developed a number of writing strategies and approaches that help us shift away from our own self-doubts and writing hurdles. What if you didn’t have to turn off who you are when you’re writing? What if we shared with you that the different ways you use languages in your everyday life can fortify your writing as you design your academic voice? As we show in this essay, we have gained critical practices to embrace all of our languages as part of who we are, shifting our writing from what’s “appropriate” or “standard” to thinking of our language vision, playfulness, and voice as part of what it means to be a language architect.

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2010, pp. 110-118. 

What would a composition course based on the method I urge look like? […] First, you must clear your mind of [the following…]: ‘We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style.’

-Stanley Fish, “What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3”

Cultural critic Stanley Fish come talkin bout—in his three-piece New York Times “What Should Colleges Teach?” suit—there only one way to speak and write to get ahead in the world, that writin teachers should “clear [they] mind of the orthodoxies that have taken hold in the composition world” (“Part 3”). He say dont no student have a rite to they own language if that language make them “vulnerable to prejudice”; that “it may be true that the standard language is […] a device for protecting the status quo, but that very truth is a reason for teaching it to students” (Fish “Part 3”).

Lord, lord, lord! Where do I begin, cuz this man sho tryin to take the nation back to a time when we were less tolerant of linguistic and racial differences. Yeah, I said racial difference, tho my man Stan be talkin explicitly bout language differences. The two be intertwined. Used to be a time when a black person could get hanged from the nearest tree just cuz they be black. And they fingers and heads (double entendre intended) get chopped off sometimes. Stanley Fish say he be appalled at blatant prejudice, and get even madder at prejudice exhibited by those who claim it dont happen no mo (Fish “Henry Louis Gates”). And it do happen—as he know—when folks dont get no jobs or get fired or whatever cuz they talk and write Asian or black or with an Applachian accent or sound like whatever aint the status quo. And Fish himself acquiesce to this linguistic prejudice when he come saying that people make theyselves targets for racism if and when they dont write and speak like he do.

But dont nobody’s language, dialect, or style make them ‘vulnerable to prejudice.’ It’s ATTITUDES. It be the way folks with some power perceive other people’s language. Like the way some view, say, black English when used in school or at work. Black English dont make it own-self oppressed. It be negative views about other people usin they own language, like what Fish expressed in his NYT blog, that make it so.

Hall, Stuart. “CULTURAL IDENTITY AND CINEMATIC REPRESENTATION.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36, 1989, pp. 68–81. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44111666. Accessed 24 Oct. 2022.

Both the new ‘Caribbean cinema’, which has now joined the company ‘Third Cinemas’, and the emerging cinemas of Afro-Caribbean blacks in the diasporas’ of the West, put the issue of cultural identity in question. Who is this emergent, new subject of the cinema? From where does it speak? The practices of representation always implicate the positions from which we speak positions of enunciation. What recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say ‘in our own name’, of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never exactly in the same place. Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps, instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished historical fact, which the new cinematic discourses then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always within, not outside, representation. But this view problematizes the very authority and authenticity to which the term, ‘cultural identity’, lays claim.

In this paper, then, I seek to open a dialogue, an investigation, on the subject of cultural identity and cinematic representation. The ‘I’ who writes here must also be thought of as, itself, ‘enunciated’. We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‘in context’, positioned. I was born into and spent my childhood and adolescence in a lower-middle class family in Jamaica. I have lived all my adult life in England, in the shadow of the black diaspora – “in the belly of the beast”. I write against the background of a lifetime’s work in cultural studies. If the paper seems preoccupied with the diaspora experience and its narratives of dis-placement, it is worth remembering that all discourse is ‘placed’, and the heart has its reasons.

Solomon, Jack. “Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising,” The Signs of Our Times. The Putnam Publishing Group, 1988.

Amongst democratic nations, men easily attain a certain equality of condition; but they can never attain as much as they desire.

-Alexis de Tocqueville

On May 10, 1831, a young French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in New York City at the start of what would become one of the most famous visits to America in our history. He had come to observe firsthand the institutions of the freest, most egalitarian society of the age, but what he found was a paradox. For behind America’s mythic promise of equal opportunity, Tocqueville discovered a desire for unequal social rewards, a ferocious competition for privilege and distinction. As he wrote in his monumental study, Democracy in America:

When all privileges of birth and fortune are abolished, when all professions are accessible to all, and a man’s own energies may place him at the top of any one of them, an easy and unbounded career seems open to his ambition…But this is an erroneous notion, which is corrected by daily experience. [For when] men are nearly alike, and all follow the same track, it is very difficult for any one individual to walk quick and cleave a way through the same throng which surrounds and presses him.

Yet walking quick and cleaving a way is precisely what Americans dream of. We Americans dream of rising above the crowd, of attaining a social summit beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. And therein lies the paradox.

The American dream, in other words, has two faces: the one communally egalitarian and the other competitively elitist.

Henry, Kelsey E. “Monstrous Motherhood,” The Point, 30 Oct. 2015, https://thepointmag.com/criticism/monstrous-motherhood/.

Anger at a child. How shall I learn to absorb the violence and make explicit only the caring?

—Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born

When we meet Mommy she is wearing a mask. She has just returned home from facial reconstructive surgery, which we are led to believe was purely elective. She harbors new desires, inclinations and impulses that turn her opaque at the very moment her twin sons demand transparency. When they knock, she stills her footsteps and holds her breath, praying for their departure. When they peer in at her, she swiftly draws the blinds and scolds them for looking. When they call, she cannot hear them. Or worse, she does not care to hear them.

Horror films exact their most masterful scares by turning the familiar strange. Their generic strength resides in distortions and perversions of the people and places we call safe. An unfamiliar mother must be unsafe, right? The Austrian thriller Goodnight Mommy is the most recent addition to an emerging canon of “mommy horror,” a still-gestating subgenre that troubles the supposed infallibility of a mother’s love for her children.