We sold our soul to academic discourse.

"but I am unwilling to believe that any reasonable college professor would fail to recognize a good essay even if it didn’t contain this exclusive language."

This quote from one of the posts struck me. I understand exactly what this person meant. It is hard to believe that any "reasonable" person couldn't recognize a good essay because of the language, but I think we all have these little subconscious pet peeves that could strike even the most reasonable of teachers. I think I said this last week, but it is so important to know your biases as a reader. I'm reading Teaching Grammar in the Context of Writing by Constance Weaver. She gave a survey to business people, I believe, and asked them to rank how much the grammatical or punctuation error bothered each person. Many of the errors were dialectic--errors of social class.

All of this reminded me of Ruby Payne's book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, I can't remember the language she used to describe this but she talked about talking about language appropriate to the occassion. That's nothing new, but explicit talk about this is necessary.

So I teach first year comp and academic writing (two separate courses) to seniors in high school. Beginning writers are egocentric. Most of the time they haven't had lots of opportunity to write to various audiences and for various purposes. I think that writing a lot and allowing many different kinds of responses to the writing--becoming fluent writers--helps them, eventually, to join academic discourse. We have all joined academic discourse whether we like it or not.