Some Not So Urban Musings Part 1

The blog, The Urban Muse, recently published a post titled, “College Writing Lessons You Can Discard in the Real World.” The author, Stephanie Brooks, is a self described education blogger who feels online education is “the future,” and evidently spends her time (according to the accompanying author blurb) researching the top online colleges and universities and handing out advice to online students in her digital version of Lucy Van Pelt.

Given the title of her post, you might think I’m going to take offense, or at least exception, to her underlying premise that there are indeed lessons from your college writing classes that you can simply dismiss once you are in the “real world.”  Believe me, I was more than ready to.  However, reading through her list of insights, I found there really wasn’t much I disagreed with.  At least not at face value.  Here is what she says you can forget:

1. Fill up on jargon.
2. No late passes.
3. Praise the grammar gods.

These points don’t seem to be anything I’d take issue with so much as things to make me wonder when was the last time Brooks was actually in a writing classroom. These all seem to be legitimate concerns of students and discussion topics of instructors on a fairly regular basis.  It would seem that we would agree and leave it at that, but then a funny thing happened…I started thinking about the examples she provides, her logic, tone, and overall characterization of writing classes and instructors…and then I started to try to figure out why she has this attitude…and then, of course, I found myself not only disagreeing with most of what she says but the fact that she’s posted this at all (which we’ll get to...eventually).

In defense of her first point she says, “In business, clear and concise writing is preferred to jargon-filled, intellectual-sounding arguments. In the real world, clarity is king, whether you’re writing an email or a blog post.”  News flash, Ms. Brooks, but in composition classes, we really prefer clear and concise writing as well.  In fact, this is one of the biggest issues I see in freshman writing.  Getting students to understand that everything—every single word, phrase, sentence, etc. in the draft needs to have a clear and specific purpose for being there.  It needs to be there as a result of a concrete choice the student writer has made.  Jargon, filler, and fluff are not hallmarks of good writing.  I don’t know anyone who teaches writing who would say they are.

 

In fact, we just had this discussion in my ENGL 102 class the other day.  My students had read an excerpt from a book on 21^st century literacies and were feeling like I’d pushed them into the deep end of the academic pool. With nary an intellectual lifeguard or floatie in sight.  At the end of our discussion, one student asked which I thought was better, to be clear and to the point, or to go on and on and on as the students felt this author had done. I took the opportunity to turn this into a “teaching moment” and tie the question back to our earlier discussions on how language is used to create and maintain power, that different discourse communities present us with different rhetorical situations which have their own sets of criteria, and that to really be literate in the 21^st century requires us to be able to decode those criteria, move among the different discourse communities we find ourselves in, and operate within their constraints.  Only then can we use language for our own power or resist it being used against us in ways we might not want it to be.  Part of the responsibility for clarity falls to the author, a good part of it, to be sure.  However, part of it also lies within the reader and his or her ability and willingness to navigate a text.  Therefore, I told my students, being clear and to the point is always preferable, but (and this is a big but) what is defined as clear and to the point depends upon the particular rhetorical situation, and academic journal writing and similar types of writing are not going to appear "clear and to the point" for most students who encounter them the first time or even the first 57 times, maybe; however, to people who are fluent in that discourse community, they are. (And it is my sincere hope and belief that as they learn to tread the academic waters, it will become clearer to my students as well.)

This brings me back to Brooks’ point about academic jargon.  One definition of jargon refers to language, particularly vocabulary that’s used by a certain group or profession.  (Discourse communities, anyone?)  In this sense, I would say her point of academics preferring academic jargon is true—when we are discussing work that shows you belong to a particular academic discipline. Yes, that’s what we expect you, as a student, to demonstrate to us through your writing. You understand.  You belong.  You know the verbal equivalents of the secret handshake. (Well, one thing, anyway.) However, what that "preferred academic jargon" consists of depends greatly on the discipline (sciences vs. humanities) and the level of the students’ education (undergrad vs. grad student). I certainly would not expect someone in one of my freshmen composition classes to write on the level of a peer who is writing in an academic journal, or even with the same level of discourse knowledge as a grad student or upper division English major. If I tried to demand that standard, it would be painful for everyone involved. Conversely, though, "hey sup w tht txt idk brd u?" might be clear and to the point if someone is texting or IMing a friend concerning a recent class reading assignment, but isn't really acceptable (or clear) for an in class response to that assignment. That, too, becomes painful for everyone involved.

Contrary to what Brooks implies, this lesson in understanding and using the appropriate jargon to show you belong to a particular community is justified.  Instead of jargon of this nature falling under the other definition of the word (pretentious vocabulary, confusing syntax, vague meaning, gibberish, meaningless discussions) as her logic and tone indicate all academic jargon is, the lesson taught to students by having to navigate the world of academia and learning to use appropriate jargon and rhetoric to be successful in that world underscores the fact that whatever job the student obtains after graduation will require him or her to learn, understand, and use the vocabulary, syntax, etc. that is used in that particular world as well.  

 

Not only do medical professions have their own set of vocabularies that most of us outside of them don't understand, they also have their own syntax or way of which words are arranged to convey a particular meaning.  For example, let's assume Mr. Smith goes into the hospital to receive treatment for a condition.  The treatment doesn't alleviate the condition as Mr. Smith and his doctor expected it would.  Most of us, as medical laymen would describe what occurred with words such as, "The treatment didn't work."  In this construction, it's clear that the treatment was expected to do something that it did not.  However, a note in Mr. Smith's chart would more likely say, "The patient failed to respond to the treatment."  In this case, the responsibility of failure has shifted from the treatment to Mr. Smith, the patient.  All as a result of syntax.  Studies have shown this is common medical lexicon, to shift responsibility from personnel and medical treatment and on to the patient. Whether or not that's good, bad, or otherwise (or why it occurs) is another discussion, but it does happen, and it does illustrate the need to understand how different communities in the real world use language differently.  If Mr. Smith, or a member of his family, stumbles upon this remark in his chart, they may take offense; however, it may be that no one is really "blaming" Mr. Smith so much as the medical personnel doing the charting have just learned this is how writing is done in this field.  There may be no judgement at all involved .

Ironically, too, this same chapter that my students read discussed how academic writing is being reshaped by the concerns of other literacies.  Academic writing is not a stagnate, immutable form mired in the past, irrelevant to and uniformed by other communities as Brooks would have her readers believe.  Nor is her claim that academic writing and jargon is the only type accepted in writing classrooms a valid one.  More and more composition curriculums are including multimodal texts which require students to navigate a variety of rhetorical situations and present their assignments in a variety of formats some far from the traditional essay or “scholarly” paper.  There is a genuine concern on the part of instructors that the students they teach find their discipline and it’s skills applicable beyond the confines of the classroom, and most of us understand the need to help students increase the fluidity with which they move between the academic and non-academic worlds.