Growing up in two very different cultures was hard. I always had to balance out one custom with another, one language at a time, trying not to lean too much towards one for fear that it would make me stand out in the other, but through all the juggling acts, I am pretty thankful that I didn't have to juggle writing styles or writing preferences. I never had enough experience with Arabic writing to decide if this was how I should write as opposed to western writnig/ When we watched Writing Across Borders, I could understand and agree with the ESL students' concerns with English writing, but at the same time, I can't write any other way. I think that maybe they were making too broad a generalization when it came to American writing. The examples they gave as 'writing' all had to do with personal experience writing; they said that when they would tell a story, depending on the culture, it would be told in different ways: circular, vaugely, extensivelymetaphorical. But they claimed that the way we wrote our stories was blunt, to the point and was a take-the-reader-by-the-hand type of story telling. I can agree with this, but not that ALL our writing is expected to be liek this. On the contrary, some of our 'greatest' novels are hard to understand and rely on interpretation and analysis to get tehir point across. I can't think of any specific exapmles right now, but let me know if you have one.
Anyway, my culutral preference is to write with a mix of all cultures, depending on the prompt, or on how I want to convey a certain story. I know I would probably never be able to write like the Korean, with their roundabout, vague, comparative prose, basically because I couldn't begin to think in those terms. But I could, and do, tell stories like the Ecuadorian student, who had to explain the entire background of an event before she even said what the event was. This is how I tell stories. It takes patience on behalf of the listener, but everything makes sense in the end. I'm ramble, and I think that comes from the Arab side, where social activity is such a big part of the culture that of course you have to tell three stories in one in order to properly set the scene for what story you were really meaning to tell.
I have yet to have a tutoring session with an ESL student, so I can't speak from experience, but I can predict what I would do if I noticed the difference in their writing. I would probably try to relate to their preference, and depending on the degree of difference, I might suggest tehy phrase the sentence in another way. It all depends on the difference, and from that I think I would choose whatever approach best works for the situation and writing. I don't think that just because writing is different its automatically wrong, and I would try to best preserve the author's voice and style as well as I can without the entire paper being incorrect.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think anything by Faulkner is kind of what you're getting at here. I hate those books! And, interestingly enough, it's probably because they are written in a way that's NOT my preferred style. I'm all about voice and aesthetic merit and all but I sentence should never go on for four pages. That's just wrong.
ReplyDeleteI tell my stories like that too. I feel like background information needs to be set up for my listeners to get the whole story. But, when I'm assigned a narrative (which I never am anymore; I guess that's not "academic" enough") you only have so many pages. Teachers don't want to read 30 pages of your life...so we have to narrow our focus and tell a "concise" story, sacrificing what could be something amazing and interesting to read.
I'm actually embarrassed to admit that I didn't realize you were from a multilingual household until a couple of weeks ago. I fell right into the trap of lumping all students into one category or the other: Those who seem American to me, and those who don't - and I would only consider multilingual or multicultural factors when dealing with the ones who don't. I say this because it has made me feel ridiculous ever since you brought up your Arabic friend.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, this is a very nuanced reflection - and I would expect no less from you! I think the most important point you make (a point I was trying to get to in class) is that writing and thinking and culture are all interconnected. It's not just that a Korean students writes differently from an American student from a Burmese student from an Australian student from an Arabic student; it's that, in some ways, we think differently - about argumentation, about logic, about metaphor, about ethics, about philosophy, about human relationships... And so when we tell an international student that her/his way of writing is "wrong," we are indicting an entire culture, saying, "If it's not American, it just ain't right."
And yes, the "ain't" was intentional.
"But I could, and do, tell stories like the Ecuadorian student, who had to explain the entire background of an event before she even said what the event was. This is how I tell stories. It takes patience on behalf of the listener, but everything makes sense in the end." But, what if you are telling a story that doesn't make sense, no matter how you tell it? Do you abstain from telling it all together, or do you ramble to try and find a meaning?
ReplyDeleteAnd don't tell me you've never told someone a story they didn't understand or you didn't understand yourself, cause I often have to ask you to, "'Kuwait' a minute," to make sure I didn't miss the point. But I'm not singling you out, I'm asking everyone.
The movie may have only provided examples of writing as personal experience or personal narrative, but we know it's much more, and the ways of writing almost anything in "America" has many varieties. Look at our last observation. It was an analytical observation, no? How many different ways did we approach this same analysis? How many ways could we have done it? And we're a class of Americans except for me and you. (Dr. Hawkins, I was born in Puerto Rico and have a Puerto Rican family) Imagine if we were all foreignors with different norms, customs, and approaches to writing.
ReplyDeleteAnd see, here again I would have had no idea we had another non-mainstream NES student in the class...
ReplyDelete