DW2b

“In one of the few groundbreaking works on women’s representations on Web pages, Hawisher and Sullivan (1999) found that many women put aside traditional rhetorical modes of politeness, apologetic modesty, and deference for a sassy, in-your-face, self-assertive attitude…” (Knadler 236).
I found this statement in E-Racing difference in E-Space: Black female subjectivity and the Web-based portfolio by Steven Knadler to be very true. Many women posting online are comfortable enough to show sass and self-assertive attitude while appropriating African American Vernacular English. Politeness, modesty, or deference is often disregarded online because polite, modest, and deferent comments don’t generate a response by other bloggers. On a blog on bet.com about the New York Post cartoon incident, Sharonda wrote : “I DONT WANT NO APOLOGY I WANT MONEY AINT NOTHIN GONNA BE RITE TILL OBAMA GETS US PAID WE THE ONES THAT BILT THIS COUNTRY AN WE RUNNIN IT NOW. OBAMA ALL DAY”. Here, Sharonda gets other bloggers fired up as she preaches her opinion of the potential New York Post boycott. Her bold post draws the attention of other bloggers and causes feedback to her post. This feedback is either in agreement or disagreement to her general opinion, but contain no remark or judgment to her sass or AAVE rhetoric. In this post, AAVE is strong with multiple negations, tonal semantics, and zero copula. The use of all capital letters also seems to be common among women wishing to show strong feeling on a subject. On a blog about the Rihanna/Chris Brown dispute, many posts from females spoke out in defense of Rihanna, claiming that she is clearly the victim. Lovergirl feels is appropriate to objects and wants her feelings to be known in her post: “…YOU DO HAVE TO LOOK AT THE WOMEN SIDE. IM A WOMEN MYSELF AND I KNOW THAT I WOULD NOT LET A MAN BEAT ME…SHE NEED TO SHOW SOME PHOTOS OR SOMETHIN…” Like Sharonda, Lovergirl was so bold with her blog postings partly because she was comfortable online to do so. As in the Knadler reading, LaChia was able to find “the ideal community [online] where she no longer has to explain or apologize for her ‘Blackness’ and where others understand her as she understands herself.” (236). Similarly, Sharonda and Lovergirl found a community on controversial bet.com blogs where they won’t be judged. Other bloggers may agree or disagree with what they have said but their morality, character, or intelligence isn’t questioned based on the way they express attitude, write, and type. Women can feel free to voice their opinions in a way that they wish because blogs (especially those where AAVE is actively appropriated) are relatively free of judgment.

AAVE online, DW2a

When first posed with this assignment, my first thought was to go to www.bet.com. I expected a website aiming primarily at a young, hip, black audience would embrace the appropriation of African American Vernacular English and use it frequently. However, the only evidence of AAVE I could find on the main page of bet.com was in headline links. One link read “Mayor Kilpatrick is ballin’ again!” Seeing AAVE in the headline, I was attracted to that link because I anticipated many examples of AAVE in the full article. When I clicked on the link, I found that the full story of Ex-Mayor Kilpatrick was written in Standard English. With the exception of one commenter who urges his “young brothas to get an education”, all of the comments on this article were written in Standard English. I felt like I had to search bet.com for a while until I found good examples of AAVE. The best examples of language appropriation are by bloggers not directly affiliated with BET. While some posts were written in Standard English (and one was written in Spanish), majority of the posts had traces of AAVE. One post about Trick Daddy read, “Dis ya boy Fat Tony…niggas out the hood is ready for change”. This sentence follows the rules of AAVE in three places while in Standard English, “Dis”, the omission of the word “of” between “out” and “the” and the subject/verb agreement problem between “niggas” and “is” is incorrect.
Most of the people attracted to BET are familiar with AAVE but not all of them take advantage of the opportunity to be able to practice AAVE or support black people in BET blogs. Although BET editors doe not use AAVE in any of their main news articles, AAVE is definitely appropriated by BET’s many blogs. BET offers blogs on everything from Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan and the latest genetic oddities to Rihanna’s classy ensemble and 50 Cent’s latest beef with DJ Khaled. A post about Trick Daddy by Lisa Williams read “All I can &will say iz obama made history &trick daddy spoke on it……y yall hating on trick black people stay on the subject &stop being ignorant….ya girl roc city” and assumes that all users on BET are black or that all black users support Trick Daddy. The Don argued "Of all the intelligent black actors, athletes and entertainers who have a perspective on what is at stake now, you had to pick this nappy headed nitwit."

DW 1B

There was one reason why I couldn’t stand my senior year publications class. A group of five or six junior girls would sit at a table and gossip during the entire class. It wasn’t so much what they were saying that irritated and distracted me, but how they said it. Each of the girls spoke with a dialect that sounded like a super annoyed “valley girl”. Their voice inflections, tone, pronunciation, and unnatural pauses were like nails on a chalkboard to me as they pronounced “I don’t care” as “Ion’tcaire” (that had a particularly heinous stress over the “Ion”). Another common phrase they used was “I was just sitting there, and then…”, which came out as “Ias jus- sitting there…and aTHEn”. It seemed like everybody else I knew spoke with the same tone, inflections, and mannerisms except for the nonsense of that particular group of junior girls. However, the more junior girl dialect I listened to during that semester, the more patterns I noticed. What sounded at first like sloppy, attitude-induced English surprisingly turned out to follow a structure. If not for structure, how else did the girls become fluent in this dialect? One girl must have started the high to low voice inflections, slurring of similar sounding words, and inserting a pause to illustrate a point. Her style was systematic enough for other girls to catch on and mimic the dialect. I noticed this dialect was stronger in some girls than in others and the dialect seemed to go away depending on their audience. Soon, I saw variations in other people’s speech as well. For example, some people say “like” more often than others, some drop the “g” on “ing”, and some omit syllables altogether. Then I realized that I say things in a way that is exclusive to me. What gave me the right to get down on the way the junior girls spoke when I speak in an equally matchless way? Leah Zuidema explains in “Myth #3: Standard English is better than other varieties” in Myth Education that “judgments about “good” and “bad” language use are subjective social constructions”. What may sound rash and annoying to one person may be totally acceptable and ordinary dialogue to another person or a group of people. “There is really no single dialect of English…[because] the norms for Standard English are not identical to all communities”. It is not fair for one dialect to be stigmatized because “…no matter how standard [you think your] English, all speakers are perceived by some listeners to have an “accent””. If I had seen the dialect of the junior girls as just a distinguished variety of language characterized by phonology I wouldn’t have ranked my own dialect above theirs. Had I not been so ignorant I could have placed an importance on what they were saying instead of how it had been said.

Why do so many of us speak differently at home than we do when at a professional setting? Is it because we want to sound more knowledgeable in public, because we’re linguistically lazy at home, or because of a subconscious want to sound appropriate? Is it to create cohesive groups and insure the continuation of the
group? Our voice inflections, pronunciations, and word choices reveal our thoughts, feelings, humor, intelligence and where we come from. Our unique dialects originate where we are with people we are most comfortable around.
I look up to my younger brother in a lot of ways. This sounds like a paradox, but he was the one who taught me that the way we speak is important and leaves an impact on people. When I was in 8th grade, Ian and I were talking about the results of my soccer game. I told him, “We won, we played really good”. After a long pause my 10 year old brother looked at me and said, “No, Aimee. Your team played really well”. The embarrassment of being corrected by a fifth grader made me strive to always apply the structure of Standard English to any statement or conversation. Now, even when I instant message, text, email, and most commonly facebook, I use correct grammar and punctuation. However, that is not to say that my speech is pompous or that my home speech and school or work speech are identical. Like everybody, I use slang, clichés, and idioms; I just make sure they are used correctly. My own home is filled with words that could sound foreign to anybody outside my family. For example, Ian and I refer to my grandma as “Grandmoo”, while my mom calls her “Mamoo”. We often add an “in” at the end of our dog’s names, so we have “Annin” and “Sammin” instead of “Anne” and “Sam”. My favorite household idiom is “Oh, for Christ’s sake”, meaning “You can’t be serious…”. Ian and I find words and phrases that have been lost and we try to work them back in to ordinary conversation. A classic example of this is the word “wisenheimer”. “Wisenheimer” is a word I would use in formal or informal conversation .A lot of my speech outside of school and work is comfortable and has a sarcastic or hilarious connotation. When my mom and I talk (and especially when I talk to my friends), we talk really quickly. A lot of times my speech gets slurred and it’s difficult to pick apart unless you’re prepared for fast speech. Because we know each other well, we don’t always have to annunciate and elaborate on ideas because the other person knows what we’re getting at. Being close enough to one another to use few words makes conversation comfortable. When I am at school, I am more conscious to slow down my speech.

IAR 1/25/09; It Bees That Way Sometime

What is invention? (What activities did the writer have to engage in to create the text?)

- Be knowledgeable about the structure and origin of Black English

- Explain general guidelines that both Black and White English follow

- Show formal differences between Black and White English; that just as there is "wrong" way to speak White English, there is also a "wrong" way to speak Black English. Black English in itself is not "wrong" White English

- Find examples of differences in distribution patterns, linguistics, verb tenses and forms, plurality, possessives, and the use of double negatives

What is being invented? (What ideas, practices, arguments, etc. are created by the text?)

- Compare and contrast the way an idea is stated in Black English and the way the same idea is stated in White English

- Help speakers of White English understand that Black English is equally correct

- Nobody speaks perfectly (in White or Black English) all of the time, that some grammatical practices are dropped when actually applied to conversation

- Many speakers of Black English are bi-dialect and turn off Black English when speaking to people practicing White English

What is being arranged? (What is being put in relation to what?)

- Compare and contrast the difference between "language" and "style"

- Look at language of Black English and how it has evolved over time

What is arrangement? (How are things being put in relation to one another?)

- How Black English and White English are merely different

- Translation from Black English to White English

- Explaining various parts of speech and how/why they're different from Black English to White English

- Statement from Langston Hughes

What is being revised? (What is the writer trying to change (e.g. what ideas, practices, etc.))?

- The idea that speakers of Black English are trying to pull off an uneducated version of White English

- Black English has as many rules to grammar as White English does

- That both Black and White English have changed over time and that very few people obey all grammar rules all of the time

What is revision? (What strategies are engaged specifically to help the writer achieve the revisions?)

- Sentence examples

- Cartoon

- Use of parenthesis and italics

- Story/poem by Langston Hughes