Writing Globally Part 1: Theory

This is the first in a two-part series on teaching writing for a globalized audience. Find the second part here.

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At the start of every class, I like to give my students a short writing prompt to answer. These little assignments aren’t for any points beyond participation, and they’re very open to interpretation by the students. I write so many of these prompts, sometimes I forget to actually anticipate the answers. I do not think any student of mine has every given a “wrong” answer for these writing activity, but they do give some interesting responses. 

Usually the prompts tangentially related to whatever project we’re working on: during the rhetorical analysis, I might post an ad and ask what the rhetorical situation might be, or during the collaborative research project, I might ask each group to write an argument for a day off in one sentence without talking to each other. However, some classes fall on days between projects, or I’ve just run out of ideas for a certain project, so I give the class some easy prompt and ask everyone to share as a pleasant way of starting the day. One prompt was “How’s it going?” because it was during midterms, and I wanted to give them the chance to vent about how cruel and merciless a leader I am right before I gave them their real midterm course evaluations. From this prompt, I expected a few rants about the .001% extra credit I had offered so far, or maybe just a brief “it’s fine,” but that expectation made the assumption that everyone had interpreted the question the same way. In that class, 1 student was from China, 1 from Kuwait, and 2 were from Saudi Arabia. The student from Kuwait and 1 student from Saudi Arabia provided the expected answers: apparently, they were doing alright, a little tired though. However, the student from China and the other student from Saudi Arabia both mentioned that they hadn’t quite understood the question and instead took it as an opportunity to tell the class how very specific things in their lives were going. One student was having car trouble, and the other had just seen a good movie. Neither answer was wrong or even far from what I expected as answers, but both represented students interpreting a seemingly-neutral prompt through their own cultural and linguistic lenses and understanding it differently.

Not exactly what happened to him, but it was exciting to hear something different

When I first started talking to my students about analyzing blogs, one thing we went over was understanding the audience for those blogs. I used a lot of examples from travel blogs, so the audience we came up with were people who enjoyed traveling, people who wanted to travel but couldn’t, or people making plans to travel. We broke those audiences down a bit more to what would appeal to each of them, but at no point did anyone say anything like “well, the audience is Americans because the blog is in English.” And I’m glad nobody said that for two reasons. One, I didn’t want to be the one to point out that English is spoken in more places than the United States. Two, I didn’t want to tell that student they were wrong to assume that English would only appeal to people who speak it as a first language because there are many, many things that don’t appeal to me that are written in English.

There is no standard way of communicating to an audience based on where they’re from. There’s is no universally effective way to communicate despite the daydreams of Human Resource departments everywhere. In “Globalization and the Teaching of ‘Communication skills,’” Deborah Cameron writes that “promoting particular interactional norms, genres and speech-styles across languages, on the grounds that they arc maximally ‘effective’ for purposes of ‘communication.’” Arguing that communication can be standardized based on what forms of communication are most effective for every audience is reductive and assigns primacy to a certain type of communication based on the nebulous concept that any one way of communicating is more effective.

A hand-written list ranking the most universally effective ways of communicating

Cameron points out that any language teaching “both requires and contributes to the process of language standardization.” By telling students that one way of communicating is more effective than another, we are functionally standardizing language. However, if we think back to my international students who answered “How’s it going” differently than expected, we can get some insight into what could be done to mitigate some of the standardizing effects of language teaching. Cameron writes that “institutionalizing some people’s preferred practices as norms will be to define large numbers of other people as inadequate or ‘substandard’ communicators,” or, by arguing that one way of communicating is more effective, anyone communicating differently is suddenly able to be perceived as an ineffective communicator. However, in teaching students to write for a global audience, we don’t have to tell them to communicate in a rote way that fits everyone of a certain nationality or geography. Instead, I think we should teach them that universally effective communication does not exist and, instead of trying to write from some mythical neutral perspective, they should be aware of how their language will be interpreted, will they be understood as they intended, and what can they do to control how the audience understands their language.