The Many Literacies of Life...

Ooooooh, profound start. Or not.

Because this is more informal than a paper, this will not be perfect... So here we go!

Both my parents are heavily involved with language; my mother was once a speech pathologist, now an English teacher and my father is a long time English professor at Reedley College. My "primary discourse" (Gee 156) should then be proper or academic English due to the constant speech corrections at home and later at grade school. However, academic writing (the process of recording academic English) still haunts me. It is not the formulation of one good sentence-it is the formulation of one good, clear, correct, and "proper" essay.

As Gee states in his essay "Primary Discourses can change, hybridize with other Discourses, and they can even die" (157), I only feel that I lost the ability to truly speak "grammatically correct", standard English over the years in school. (Who talks like a scholar outside the classroom anyway?) But I can still write "proper" English when the time calls even though it takes more time. So did I really lose it? No, guess not. However, I still do not understand the need for grammar...

My other Discourses, the ones I find bleeding into my everyday speech (much like Amy Tan's "family talk" and "language of intimacy" [Mother Tongue]), are: band-o talk, pigeon talk, biology talk, anatomy talk, chemistry talk, and the like. Band-o talk/speech is foremost of the infiltrator of my "family speech"; I occasionally find myself singing instead of talking, amusing myself with rhythm and rhyme, and talking about music figures with my dad, who looks on and says "Sure Kris, whatever you say." Pigeon talk, the way I talk with my friends, will last for up to four hours after hanging out with my girls; the reason why I call it pigeon talk-we do not always complete our words, but drop syllables and talk loudly and excitedly about whatever amuses us. And all academic classes talk...well...for me, when you learn something new (like Sumpter's terminology for all aspects of plants) you just have to use it. Serious fun. No joke.

But how close am I to academic English (the real point to this post)? In writing, closer than some, but not that close, because I do not speak it fluently. Just like a foreign language, one must be immersed in academic English to really speak, write and understand it. I get a great dose of the reading (I love classics and books written by amazing contemporary authors, like Alexander McCall Smith), but tend to stay away from speaking and writing. Therefore, I can imitate only the styles that I read in my writing, but no more. To really find my "voice" in writing, I should stay in the academic sub-culture learn my grammar and go from there. But, that will not occur until a year or so from now (in the most dreadedand looked forward to college), and right now, I like myself and my manner of speech and writing. So...I'll no doubt change over time, maybe adapt and accept a "proper" writing style, but until then, I'll let my discourses mix a bit.