Language Diversity and Academic Writing

About the Bedford Spotlight Reader Series

Preface for Instructors

Contents by Discipline

Contents by Theme

Contents by Rhetorical Purpose

Introduction for Students

Chapter One: How Does Language Reflect Who We Are?

Lee Romney, Revival of Nearly Extinct Yurok Language Is a Success Story

Louise Erdrich, Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart

Amy Tan, Mother Tongue

Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Susan Tamasi and Lamont Antieau, Social Variables

Connie Eble, from Slang and Sociability: In-Group Language among College Students

H. Samy Alim, Hip Hop Nation Language

Marybeth Seitz-Brown, Young Women Shouldn’t Have to Talk Like Men to Be Taken Seriously

Dennis Preston, Some Plain Facts about Americans and Their Language

Cheryl J. Boucher, Georgina S. Hammock, Selina D. McLaughlin, and Kelsey N. Henry, Perceptions of Competency as a Function of Accent

Carmen Fought, Are White People Ethnic? Whiteness, Dominance, and Ethnicity

John McWhorter, Straight Talk: What Harry Reid Gets about Black English

Rusty Barrett, Rewarding Language: Language Ideology and Prescriptive Grammar

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Intersecting Variables and Perceived Sexual Orientation in Men

Mark Peters, He Said, Sheme Said

Tom Chatfield, OMG—It’s the Textual Revolution

Naomi S. Baron, Are Digital Media Changing Language?

Douglas Quenqua, They’re, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve

Edwin L. Battistella, Slang as Bad Language

Robert MacNeil, English Belongs to Everybody

Erin McKean, How Are Dictionaries Made?

Robert MacNeil and William Cran, The Language Wars

Rosina Lippi-Green, The Standard Language Myth

Kevin Roozen, Writing Is a Social and Rhetorical Activity

Kevin Roozen, Writing Is Linked to Identity

Paul Kei Matsuda, Writing Involves the Negotiation of Language Differences

Peter Elbow, Speaking and Writing

Susan Wyche, Time, Tools, and Talismans

Mike Rose, Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language

Carie Gauthier, Metaphors in the Writing Process of Student Writers (student essay)

Dan Berrett, Students Come to College Thinking They’ve Mastered Writing

Chris Thaiss and Terry Myers Zawacki, What Is Academic Writing? What Are Its Standards?

Susan E. Schorn, A Lot Like Us, but More So: Listening to Writing Faculty Across the Curriculum

J. Paul Johnson and Ethan Krase, Writing in the Disciplines: A Case Study of Two Writers

Paul Kei Matsuda, The Image of College Students and the Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity

Helen Fox, Worldwide Strategies for Indirection

Vershawn Ashanti Young, The Problem of Linguistic Double Consciousness

Nancy Sommers and Laura Saltz, Writing that Matters: A Paradigm Shift

Anne E. Whitney, "I Just Turned In What I Thought": Authority and Voice in Student Writing