In response to the March 16 article, “Activist speaks out against West Virginia mountaintop removal,” I live in an area of Mercer County where the blasting has severely damaged wells.
Like a lot of communities, we had a meeting and spoke with the company doing the removal.
Low and behold, afterward they rushed to the strip mine.
Today’s blast jarred my grandparents’ hearth from the fire place.
Yet, this is small compared to the countless wells lost, sunk and caved in.
Now these are blasts that they claim we can’t fill.
I’m looking for activist who can help us with our problem.
My initial reaction was "Wow, this guy writes like a 5th grader." After that split-second, initial judgment was passed, I realized not only what I had just thought, but also the implications of those thoughts and their relation to the letter. Scotty Jones of West Virginia finds himself in a situation where he and his community are completely helpless at the hands of a large and apparently uncaring mining company, but my first thought passed judgment on his grammar and stylistic choices.
Needless to say, I was a bit disgusted with myself. The meaning and purpose of the text is clear– a concerned community seeks the help of students. Why then, did I respond to the inadequacies of the text rather than to its call for action? The simple and unfortunate truth is that we have been taught, especially as we progress through academia, to judge people based on their writing. We have been assigned value for years based on our writing skills, and the judgment that I passed was simply an automatic reflection of that fact. Unfortunately, this mindset caused me to miss the bigger picture. Aside from the destruction of a community, I completely disregarded secondary questions such as "What is Scotty Jones' primary use of literacy?" Clearly, it is not primarily used for writing academic essays. Nevertheless, Mr. Jones realizes that the practice of literacy can be used to help his community. I feel angry at myself for judging him based on his poor stylistic choices.
Has anyone else had an experience like this? It's a bit of a shock to realize that even when we claim to value content and meaning over form and structure, all of these aspects contribute to our overall understanding and assessment of writing.
7 comments:
I think that most of us have had experiences like this one. Every time I read a newspaper, I'm looking for mistakes and/or sub-par writing. Why? I'm not really sure, but I think it has something to do with the credibility of the article. If is has grammatical errors, multiple typos and/or sub-par writing, I don't trust the subject of the article.
This relates back to the idea that we have been taught to judge people based on their writing. Because Scotty Jones doesn't write like a professional, I think we automatically marginalize what he has to say. We expect what we read to be written a certain way, and that 'way' reflects upon the writer.
That said, I don't that we judge the person, as in, I'm sure Mr. Jones is a perfectly nice person. Treats his family well, his pet dog, washes his dishes when he's done with them, etc. However, acknowledging that his writing isn't great causes us to question his understanding of the situation. Jones doesn't write like a professional so he must not be a professional, which means perhaps he doesn't fully understand everything that is going on. Maybe the problem isn't really a problem. Like I said, we marginalize his writing, him, and the subject. It is exactly what I do with articles.
Writing reflects trustworthiness, bad writing forces the reader to question to trustworthiness of the piece. This is not a bad thing. It forces the reader to be a critical reader, something we value (especially with in the English community). It is important to remember, however, that not everyone is part of this community or a part of academia, and that we shouldn't automatically disregard the Scotty Jones' of the world.
I live amongst the "functional semi-literate" farmers and mountain folk of rural Pa, who cannot articulate themselves past an rudimentary level of what we deem functional literacy.
I found that these folks seldom engage in any kind of writing met to be read by others outside of their social group/clan/tribe/etc. Most of their writing is dispensable in nature: grocery lists, notes to each other (left on vacant homes of someone they were attempting to visit), directions, etc.
I think it would be interesting to know Scotty's age and if he is enrolled in some kind of higher education?
It is also interesting to see the flip side (how they react to college educated people). They see students as people who can write and speak in lofty terms, but are for the most part, inept at common sense tasks... which I tend to agree with.
Cheers!
I definitely agree with you there. Some of the "smartest," i.e. most educated, people that I know couldn't figure out how to use a can opener. Okay, maybe it's not that bad, but common sense is often lacking in highly academic circles.
Anyway, I too would be interested in knowing Scotty's educational background. I guess that since I was reading it in the Collegian, my initial reaction was that he was in some way tied to Penn State or higher education in general. There is, however, no indication of his level of education.
1. I have screwed up using a can opener before so I take, "most educated, people that I know couldn't figure out how to use a can opener," quite personally.
2. As far as Scotty getting his message across and getting a reader reaction, I think he's well written. I sympathize with his plight when he references the effects of the mining on his grandparents. I just wish I knew how losing all these wells was affecting the community.
I think it is in our nature as English/education/writing of some sort majors in college to cringe at poor writing. Just the other week there was a HUGE picture in the Daily Collegian that had a picture of a protester at one of the public education budget cut rallies holding a sign up that said "I can't afford to loose my tuition,". Obviously they meant lose my tuition but they even colored in the two o's to look like eyes, and when you think about it, tuition is what you pay to go to school, so to lose part of it or all of it means you don't have to pay, making it that losing your tuition is not a bad thing.
This sign that seemed to be done by a college student enraged me more than the budget cuts, it made me think why would anyone want their tax dollars going towards these semi-literates. I then got to thinking that although typos and misuse of words can cause my eyes to glaze over and loose track of all thought, that these errors may not reflect on people or that person as a whole. Maybe the person in the picture is a math wiz.
Is it funny that as I was reading these responses, I found grammatical/usage errors in almost every one of them? ha ha ha. I'm only pointing this out to illustrate how ironic it is that a conversation discussing how judgmental we as students, and academia in general, can be about people who make grammatical errors, when we are making the same errors. Clearly, everyone makes mistakes. I know that as you are all reading this you are probably looking for mistakes in my writing, just as I had done in yours, and we all had done in the Collegian, or any other publication we read. But, I don't believe that minor or accidental grammatical errors measure a person's level of literacy. And just as Eddie had expressed initially, we should be focusing more on the content of the message and what is trying to convey.
I read a post on a forum several months ago regarding a business idea. It was an informal forum on a pool website and was written poorly, with many spelling errors and the writer's West Virginian dialect was evident. The replies to this post were not regarding the business idea, but rather ridiculing the level of writing. I felt the same way as you did Eddie, because i found myself judging him too. It was only after reading the comments that I realized that although the person may not be able to write as effectively as the college students or authors we are accustomed to reading as students, he or she might have an invaluable opinion to offer that is very possible to be revolutionary. I openly admit that I am technologically illiterate, I know almost nothing about the technical nature of computers, or how to fix problems that arise, but that does not mean I am not literate in another sense.
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