I was supposed to write a response to the weekly reading I did for one of my classes, Methods for Teaching Writing, or something like that. That’s what the next few days are for. I plan on posting these responses here. This is the response to the reading on the first day of class:
“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan
Amy Tan’s article has won me over, because I can relate to it. I myself have wondered how my “Englishes” have held me back, and maybe also where they yet could take me. My mother’s mother was an English major from the Chicago area, so I have been subjected to the “proper” form of American Standard English through that line. However, my dad’s English was that of a “Yooper” from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where the deer outnumber the people and the English would make a backwoods Canadian fur-trapper blush. Even so, my dad went to college and spent his entire adult life outside of the U.P., factors which diluted his Yooper English and prevented me from picking up many of its peculiarities.
Additional components to my linguistic makeup come from where I was raised geographically. I was born in Malawi, and though my family moved from there before I turned two, some of the British and Chichewa expressions of the area stayed with us (if it’s not my imagination, I remember hearing that as little kids my sisters and I even had hints of a British accent). After Malawi, we then lived in various parts of francophone Africa until I was nine. My parents plugged us kids into French schools during this time, and it’s safe to say that I spoke French better than English up until I was about ten. I used English at home to be sure, but when my family finally moved to the U.S. in 1995 I can remember feeling that other kids my age knew a bunch of words I had never heard before, and that I had some catching up to do.
Having been in the U.S. now for almost fifteen years, I’ve developed the Englishes that will communicate with my surroundings here, and I’ve learned what Englishes do not belong here. I still catch myself wondering sometimes if something that sounds normal to me is actually just a “family-ism,” and occasionally friends will point out funny ways I have of putting things, but for the most part I’ve caught on to Standard American English. I’m relieved though to read that Amy Tan is no grammarian and that her success in writing came after she embraced her own Englishes, because I’m still a little shaky on my explicit knowledge of grammar, and as a matter of taste I think that the most enjoyable writing is not rigidly academic. I recognize the need to be able to use “good” grammar and write academically in order to be taken seriously in certain situations, but I generally subscribe to the linguists’ belief that grammar is descriptive rather than prescriptive. I think that good communication involves getting your message across in the most effective way, with as little getting in the way of that goal as possible. I also think that the message you may want to get across is not always limited to the semantic. If you are communicating with intimates, for instance, you may have something you want to say, but you also have an understanding of your relationship that you want to maintain as you say it. If you seem concerned with sounding academic in such a situation, it could communicate a lack of comfort in being with the other person, or possibly trigger the “Who do you think you are?” effect. It would be best instead to use relaxed grammar and even relaxed word choice, opting for expressions and turns of phrase rather than home run SAT words. And if you are communicating with my family dog, it doesn’t matter much what words you say, but your tone makes all the difference. However, if you are writing an article for the University, it would probably not be prudent to be too liberal with your choice of language. In that case, readers might get impatient if you delay the communication of some information by your flare for style.
I find constraints on voice an unfortunate fact of formal writing, and have struggled in the past to remove my voice from things like job applications and term papers because I hate to sound so unlike myself—it feels almost dishonest. And in the same way that I prefer vocalists who have distinct and subtle nuances in their voices to those who have had all the individuality classically trained out of their voices, I prefer writers with distinctive voices that shine through. But I suppose that, until the day when I have a following like Amy Tan’s that I’ve groomed to go wherever I will in my writing, I should comply with exterior demands placed on me, and should teach my students how to do the same.
-Baggervais
