Composition Forum 44, Summer 2020
http://compositionforum.com/issue/44/

Engaging the Perpetual ‘But’: Missy’s Story

Missy Watson

My pedagogical ideals are regularly challenged as I provide feedback on student writing. Consider two examples from my day-to-day exchanges.

It’s office hours and one of my first-year writing students shows up. Having finished several rounds of drafting, this student, a woman of color, asks me to help “polish” her paper. Her essay is smart, well crafted, and hardly in need of further work, so we talk a while about her many strengths. Later, after I encounter a few recurring instances of nonstandardized language uses (namely, subject verb agreement norms and omissions of copula “be” verbs), I pause to ask her whether it was her intention to push conventions. She doesn’t claim it to be a typo; instead, she looks unsure. I point out the language norms that have been standardized in academic English as well as other norms across Englishes, and I present different rhetorical and linguistic options for her to consider and ask if she has others she wishes to pursue. She’s well informed about standard language ideology and its racist consequences, having examined these issues in my composition class. As is the case in other moments like these, I reserve some hope that she will respond with “Yes, I want to contest conventions!” But I’m braced for the far more frequent request for the standardized option, which she ultimately selects. I, of course, honor her choice. I don’t try to persuade this already-fully-informed student to make a different linguistic choice—one that she worries might result in a lower grade or critical comment in other classes and parts of the academy. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling despair in these moments given my personal, political, and pedagogical aims to combat raciolinguistic injustice and to see language differences included and accepted in the academy and far beyond.

Later that evening, at home with the family, I try to squeeze in an hour to provide feedback on a graduate student’s thesis. This student, a multilingual man of color, has produced a brilliant ethnographic analysis of the roles that language ideologies play in workers’ and students’ lives in Haiti. The draft is ready for some editing work. Halfway through, I find myself pausing, rereading my feedback, and cringing to discover far more directives than negotiations in some of my sentence-level suggestions. Some of my “suggestions,” for instance, included direct edits of prepositions (an issue I myself struggle with) and of so-called informal language with more academic language (e.g., changing “school, money, and job” to “education, financial security, and employment”), as well as editing fragments starting with “although” and “whereas” so that they became dependent clauses attached to previous and/or following sentences. There were also a few instances where I directly edited phrases that, apparently, seemed unclear or “awkward” to me. It seemed I’d fallen into monolingualist habits, a personal and pedagogical conflict exasperated by the fact that this student, like all of my students, knows all too well my devotion to translingual pedagogies and raciolinguistic justice, not to mention the fact that he himself is challenging the dominance of standard language ideology in and through his work.

But, it’s the end of the day, my third read of this thesis, I’m tired, this thesis needs to be finished, and this student intends to graduate in a week; careful and critical negotiations with the student, at this point, feel out of reach. And despite having long opposed service mentalities in composition, I can’t seem to fully shake the pressure and anxiety in this moment that comes with anticipating how other readers in my department and beyond would respond to a thesis with what folks in the academy might deem as inadequacies or errors. I find myself reasoning that the various constraints I’m working under call for some of my justice-oriented pedagogical approaches to be put aside. No matter my rationalizations, I leave this moment feeling all sorts of shitty.

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