"Hey" v. "Hello" = Academic v. Colloquial language

Patricia Bizzell states right up front that there is a fissure in the way members of society use language. Jacqueline Royster agrees when she puts up for examination her three insights about language. Insight number one states that "Academic discourse, like all language use, is an invention of a particular social milieu" (Royster 25).

Basically what these two women are saying is that when academics teach language to students, they are teaching something alien. Something that these residents of our classrooms have never encountered: academic discourse. It's a matter of us versus them.
"There is the language, the discourse of academe and there are other languages and discourses that are not academic" (Royster 24). We really are a haughty bunch aren't we?

When I started teaching English 101 approximately, oh 3 weeks ago, give or take a minute or two, and attempted to describe different forms of literacy to my students I got various versions of "literacy is the ability to read and write, and maybe understand the text." I was shocked, but I shouldn't have been. After spending a semester surrounded by the creme de la creme of English academics, I should have expected to be confronted by this (whaddya know?) different form of literacy. We use words like "drastic revision" to describe our students' work. "Whether by intent or by default, we have centralized in our conversations [with other academics] a default view of what can be sanctioned as good writing (as enacted through a traditional view of the freshman essay), a view that has functioned ultimately to tether, rather than enable an evolving discussion" (Royster 24).

This reminds me of my second paper assignment for the classes I teach. So far we've (as a class) discussed what they expect out of an English 101 class and their personal definitions of literacy...of which you heard an aforementioned example. This next essay is about writing from sources, and I gave them Mina Shaughnessy's "Diving In" and Lisa Delpit's "The Silenced Dialogue" to read and pull from. These women offer a position that it is the teachers who ought to be doing the adapting, rather than the student. I wanted to see what they thought of that position. I'll try to keep you updated on those results.

Anyways, what Bizzell and Royster are trying to say is that academe is a "specialized territory," and that those outside of it don't understand those inside (Royster 23). They encourage us to work for change, to work for a blending or at least slight cohesion in different types of discourses; to make academic discourse at least a teensy tiny bit more accessible.

We can try.