I’ve never considered myself an egotistical person until now, looking back on when I started working at the Writing Center. I wasn’t egotistical about my writing skills, necessarily. From my years of helping students with their papers in my free time, I understood (and still do) that every student has their own strengths and weaknesses in writing, including myself. No, my attitude was the same one reflected in many, if not all, of my English professors, which is that Standardized English, sometimes referred to as academic English, is the only correct way to communicate, and anyone who does not use it should.

There is, of course, some truth in this. Standardized English is needed to succeed in academia as well as the professional world. You dress up your language for the same reasons you dress in slacks for an interview: to put your best self forward, to make the most positive impression possible. The problem arises when we consider and treat Standardized English as the only correct way to communicate and when this perception, likely subconsciously, comes through in our tutoring sessions. It’s when we make statements like, “You shouldn’t use double negatives” or “You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition”. But why could these be potentially harmful? They are true statements, after all.

It wasn’t until I took a linguistic anthropology course that I began to question this line of thinking. It started with learning that this type of English became standardized because some random guy decided it sounded better, even if it went against how people during that time and present day naturally speak. He even broke his own rules while explaining what is proper. Then I learned that what I had previously considered “slang” or just an “incorrect” way to speak English are technically considered languages all on their own. African American English, for example, is often considered by people in the professional world as such, but it actually has its own rules about structure and grammar it consistently follows; to the linguistic community, it is its own unique language.

Because of this, Linguistic anthropologists believe that we are teaching Standardized English all wrong. It’s true that we should use Standardized English in academic and professional settings, but we can do this without implying that Standardized English is better than all other forms of English. Instead, we can follow the examples of other languages (such as Spanish) and teach it as context specific. This means that in a tutoring session, if a student ends a sentence with a preposition, we can say, “Academic English doesn’t allow ending sentences in prepositions.” This takes out the negative connotations that come with simply saying “it’s wrong”.

I think one of our main jobs as tutors is to build the student’s writing confidence, and Linguistic research has shown that implying their own natural way of speaking as wrong accomplishes the opposite. All it involves is changing the way we word our suggestions and emphasizing the context specific qualities of language. If we as tutors can accomplish this, maybe we can help our students understand that their natural style is not necessarily wrong – it’s just not academic.