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The Importance of Writing How We Speak

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by Jamie Wirth

Early on in my academic education I was taught the proper language to write and talk to others. I had to make sure I always wrote in MLA format, I had to capitalize proper nouns, and I learned how to correctly use punctuation in my writing in order for my work to be deemed acceptable by others. Throughout this learning process, I was never asked how I wanted to convey my own opinions. When writing to adults or people in positions of authority it was considered improper to use abbreviations or slang, as it could be interpreted as uneducated. But often in positions like these I was left with a feeling of discomfort as I would be in a constant battle of making sure I was showing them my true personality, but only enough so that my writing would not be interpreted as informal. While there may be some instances where writing should remain formal, people should be both taught and allowed to write more similar to the way they speak.

Code meshing allows for writers to clearly get their point across in language their readers will understand, as they create a sense of comfortable conversation and familiarity with readers. Code meshing, explained by Vershan Ashwanti Young in his piece Should Writers Use They Own English? discusses how “Code meshing blend dialects, international languages, local idioms, chat-room lingo, and the rhetorical styles of various ethnic and cultural groups in both formal and informal speech acts”. Personally, using informal language in this explanation makes it very easy for a student reader like myself to understand this uncommon use of rhetoric. Young explains how he believes that one’s writing style should reflect who they are as a person, therefore sound like how they would actually speak. Currently typing this paper, Google Docs is continually underlying aspects of Young’s writing, signifying that the grammar is wrong. But what if society could accept that maybe the grammar isn’t wrong, but rather one’s perception of informality is? The informal tone of Young’s piece helps me to better understand his point of view and makes me realize how much of society and education is conditioned to write in a “proper” format because it will be interpreted better by others. Yet, Young’s informal diction did just that for me, and made it easier for me to relate. In addition to the informal writing style Young displays throughout his piece, Young also touches upon the concept of Black English, which is more specific and comes with higher stakes than more general informality. This is partially a result of, along with other accents and language, that “proper” English is unfortunately seen as the most educated and common language that should be spoken nationwide, or even globally. Nonetheless, writing allows others to creatively express their opinions and share what they believe others would experience.  

Being taught to write as we speak could help expand one’s diction to use in one’s everyday vocabulary, so people would not feel the need to have a distinction between their learned writing skills and conversational skills. While it is important to learn the basics of language and writing and sentence structure “quotation marks can indicate reported speech, and capitals can indicate proper nouns, but we gain a sense of the writer’s personality when they’re also available for use as “scare quotes” and Ironic Capitals” (McCulloch)”.  Scarce quotes are imperative to informal writing as they convey an ironic or skeptical stance toward the word or phrase they’re around. This “improper” diction requires the reader to read between the lines and get a better understanding of the author’s personality and writing style. One’s ability to write comprehensively does not mean that when they write what they speak their writing abilities will diminish. Allowing one to write how they talk may even help one explore their sense of self which they can include to make their writing better.

An alternative form of changing language, code switching, can often have a toxic impact mentally, as it sparks a feeling of peer pressure. Code switching is the process of shifting from one form of language to another, and it will often change depending on one’s social setting. People often worry about fitting in with others and “very often, people code-switch — both consciously and unconsciously — to act or talk more like those around them”(Thompson). If students are taught at an early age to write differently than they speak to conform with social norms, they may begin to lose their sense of identity. This is extremely applicable in everyday life as “A speaker’s code-switching corresponds to his/her previous exposure through social networks, and personal attitudes” (Liu). This exemplifies how one’s surroundings can easily pressure them into code switching in order for them to feel accepted in an environment that may make them feel self conscious, and is arguably the most influential impact of code switching. This is evident in the Huffpost article that states “An immigrant 4-year-old boy from Poland (or China) who just moved to St. Louis is more likely to speak perfect English and love baseball within a year because he wants to fit in with the other kids” (Hoffman). This models the psychological ideal of conformity which is when people change their speech, attitudes, actions etc in order to match others around them in order for them to feel included. This yearning of a desire for inclusivity will encourage not only young children but people of all ages to possibly use more informal language in their daily vocabulary if other people they look up to or hangout with use slang frequently. Fearing that they won’t fit in and be accepted, that person will adopt commonly used slang words, with hopes that they will not be seen as different or as an outcast by others. 

I have personally seen first hand how easy it is to utilize code switching in my daily vocabulary. After coming to College of Charleston, many of the friends I have made here are from the South, so naturally I began to incorporate their vocabulary into my own. When hanging out with my friends at school, I began to notice when I was with them, I began using “y’all” more when talking to them as a group. Yet, when I came home for fall break and spent more time with my family and friends, I quickly switched my vocabulary back to “you guys” in order to fit in with the vocabulary used around me. While code-switching I personally did not feel pressured by others to change my vocabulary with fears that I would not be accepted, however, changing my word choice allowed me to feel more comfortable in my surroundings.  

However, code switching is still necessary in many aspects of life in order to prove professionalism, education and economic status to others. The way one articulates is very important in a professional setting. Stanley Fish mentions this topic in regards to code switching as he adds “You’re not going to be able to change the world if you are not equipped with the tools that speak to its present condition” (Fish). If someone is running for a government office or promotion, they will not be taken seriously if they write speeches or submit applications using slang or wording others may not understand. For voters in rural areas a politician may gear his speech towards farmers using words like “folks” and in urban areas like Spanish Harlem, New York City, you may interject Spanglish (a hybrid of Spanish and English) to appeal to and connect with your audience. While being allowed to write informally,  similar to how you speak,  is applicable for many situations, there are still distinctions in both the business and professional sense that involve the need for code switching. Similarly, writing is often perfected in higher education in order for the students to be successful in life. This has been proven as a necessity as “Freshmen estimate that they write about 25 hours each week, and most believe that they arrived on their campus with college-level writing skills fully formed… students’ notions about writing may not match professors’ expectations…” (The Chronicle of Higher Education). Students may need this push to ensure that their writing is mature enough to pursue their future careers. 

Although formal writing is applicable in some circumstances, people should not be looked down upon when writing similar to how they speak. Writing that reflects one’s speech allows for readers to see the author’s true tone and personality, and can often help them better express themselves and their viewpoint. Readers or an audience may feel more connected and feel they share similar experiences with an author or orator if they feel similar to them. Code-switching can  also be persuasive and induce those with low self esteem or feelings of inadequacy  to conform to those around them in order to feel that they fit in.  This may be detrimental to those in the audience if they feel they must conform to others because of a low sense of self . In both writing and speaking, there is a place for code-switching and code meshing, but it is the author’s choice to identify which method is to their advantage, whether it be to gain employment, recruit votes, persuade others  or to just fit in. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited:

The Chronicle of Higher Education. 21 Mar. 2014, www.chronicle.com/article/students-come-to-college-thinking-theyve-mastered-writing/?cid2=gen_login_refresh. Accessed 31 Oct. 2021.

Fish, Stanley. “What Should Colleges Teach?” New York Times, Sept. 2009, lms.cofc.edu/d2l/le/content/267890/viewContent/3607465/View. Accessed 31 Oct. 2021.

Hoffman, Auren. “You Think for Yourself but You Act like Your Friends (on

     Homophily).” Huffpost, Nov. 2011, www.huffpost.com/entry/

     you-think-for-yourself-bu_b_182605. Accessed 4 Nov. 2021.

Liu, Hong. “A Socio-Cognitive Approach to Code-Switching: From the Perspective of a Dynamic Usage-based Account of Language.” EBSCOhost, Nov. 2020, web-p-ebscohost-com.nuncio.cofc.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=5&sid=1467d77e-2543-46f4-9043-f1b0aa4a5b65%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=146730653&db=a2h. Accessed 31 Oct. 2021.

McCulloch, Gretchen. “We Learned to Write the Way We Talk.” New York Times, Dec. 2019, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/27/opinion/sunday/internet-writing-text-emotion.html. Accessed 31 Oct. 2021.

Thompson, Matt. “Five Reasons Why People Code-Switch.” NPR, Apr. 2013, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/04/13/177126294/five-reasons-why-people-code-switch. Accessed 31 Oct. 2021.

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2010, lms.cofc.edu/d2l/le/content/267890/viewContent/3488970/View. Accessed 31 Oct. 2021.

Jamie Wirth “The Real Cost’s Response to a Rhetorical Situation”

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The Real Cost’s Response to a Rhetorical Situation

The Real Cost is a campaign whose main focus is to make teens aware of the terrible outcomes that come from vaping, like ingesting toxic metals in vapes. The Real Cost mostly targets teenagers who are believed to be most susceptible to experimenting with vaping. The Real Cost was created by the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products. On April 20, 2020 they launched a commercial titled “Nothing is as Scary as the Facts” that features a man in an empty warehouse being cornered and “attacked” by a metal monster. The monster symbolized the toxic metals and chemicals that enter lungs when people vape. In exposing this issue and urging teens to stop vaping, The Real Cost is, as Lloyd F. Bitzer wrote, responding to a “rhetorical situation”. 

According to Bitzer, there are three main concepts that make up a rhetorical situation: exigence, audience and constraints. Bitzer defines a rhetorical situation as  “a natural context of persons, events, objects, relations, and an  exigence which  strongly invites utterance” (4).  In other words, a rhetorical situation is a persuasive event that sparks a rhetorical response. Exigence refers to the audience to “be addressed and the change to be affected” (7).  He makes it clear that the exigence must be flexible by discourse to be considered rhetorical.  Bitzer defines the audience as the people who are impacted by the rhetoric event and those that can be  “capable of being influenced by discourse” meaning that the goal is to influence them on the content being shared (7).  Lastly, Bitzer defines constraints as something that is “ made up of persons, events, objects and relations”(8).  This is the case because all of those factors have the ability to inhibit the exigence. These ideas of exigence, audience and constraints are all evident in the rhetorical situation that The Real Cost is responding to. 

The vaping epidemic is a prime example of exigence as it is a detrimental ongoing event, fueled by major corporations whose economic greed overpowers their morals. One of the major conglomerates that manufactures and sells vape products is JUUL. Although the company may appear to be concerned for their customers’ well being, this was disproved when an article published in 2019 stated “a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by a former JUUL executive last week claims the company knew teens would instead buy mint, which it was leaving on the market” (Setty). Vape companies are so concerned with how much money they are making that they completely disregard their ethics and how their product is negatively affecting thousands of teens. Additionally, there is an astonishingly greater amount of nicotine in one JUUL pod than most people may think: “JUUL Labs reports each 5% (nicotine-by-weight) cartridge contains approximately 40 mg nicotine per pod and is ‘approximately equivalent to about 1 pack of cigarettes’” (Prochaska).  This is a staggering amount of nicotine being ingested, and because it is more concise, it is easier to be inhaled, which increases risk of addiction. Unfortunately, this is what the vaping manufacturers are hoping to accomplish: repeat customers.This situation makes it clear how difficult it can be to combat such major corporations whose sole purpose is to make money, fully aware that their product is detrimental to others. 

In the commercial produced by The Real Cost, the exigence of trying to stop teens from vaping by showing them how harmful it is to their lungs, is explicit. This is an example of rhetorical exigence because data has shown that over the years “The Real Cost prevented nearly 350,000 U.S. youths aged 11–18 years from initiating smoking from February 2014 to March 2016” (Brubach). This is a direct representation of how a commercial, like the one released by The Real Cost, shows the clear exigence. While many may not be aware of the harmful effects of vaping, The Real Cost works to make those effects clear for their audience.The commercial emphasizes how vaping can deliver toxic metals and lead into people’s lungs (Nothing). The Real Cost dives deeper into this argument as it makes it clear how vapes can expose teens to nicotine, which can illicit cravings and spark other symptoms of addiction. Additionally,  The Real Cost points out how many companies target youths by enticing them with colorful vape packaging or flavors like bubblegum and watermelon that persuade teens into thinking about how good it may taste, likening it to candy, and not how harmful it actually is to their body. Through their commercial, The Real Cost makes it evident that the exigence of deterring teens from vaping because of how harmful it is, needs to be addressed and taken seriously. 

The rhetorical audience from The Real Cost’s commercial consist of teens, specifically ages 11-18 who vape, and who have watched the commercial either on the internet or on television. This is a rhetorical audience as The Real Cost can influence them to realize the harmful effects of vaping and urge them to stop doing it, which would support the exigence of decreasing teens who vape as they realize the detrimental outcomes. Not only can the commercial inform them on the harmful effects of vaping, but as the The Real Cost gained popularity, the FDA evaluated the effect of their campaign and found that it  will also “save them, their families, and the country more than $53 billion by reducing smoking-related costs”(Federal Drug Administration). Through their use of commercials, The Real Cost has influenced consumers to decrease their smoke related expenses.The audience has the ability to not only learn the harmful outcomes of vaping, but also steer clear of unnecessary spending. 

The constraints exemplified by the video produced by The Real Cost are the audience’s beliefs, medium, the dialogue of the commercial itself, and the length of the commercial. The struggle with a commercial like the one produced by The Real Cost, is that if the audience disagrees with it, they can easily mute it, or shut off the device that they’re watching it on. As distinguished in the article The influence of advertising creativity on the effectiveness of commercial and public service advertisements: A dual-task study, a public service announcement (PSA) like the one The Real Cost created, has a main goal of educating its audience: “Therefore, PSAs are primarily designed to teach and educate rather than generate profit”. Many people watch television to escape reality and their responsibilities, so they may be turned off, and subsequently turn off their electronic devices when they’re met with educational evidence they do not want to hear. 

The medium in regards to the informative video would be technology. Technology in this case refers to computers where people can see the commercial on Youtube, social media seen on smartphones, along with television where people can view the commercial on live TV along with streaming services. With technology such as these, teens are shown the PSA whether they like it or not as they may have to sit through it to continue watching their favorite show. However, there are some people who do not have access to technology. The Federal Communications Commission reports “… that approximately 19 million Americans-6 percent of the population-still lack access to fixed broadband service at threshold speeds” (Federal Communications Commission).  Although this is only a small percentage of Americans, it still creates a restraint on those who can watch the PSA. Additionally, even with technology, there is a chance that not every teen who vapes has seen this commercial, rendering it unknown and ineffective to them.  

The commercial itself, while concise and informative, may not have enough dialogue and evidence to convince the audience to stop vaping. Courtney Burell, the main actor in the commercial declares “But nothing is as scary as the facts… vaping can deliver toxic metals like nickel and lead into your lungs” (Nothing). While this information is frightening and may deter most people from vaping, the video does not give actual statistics or show the effect of one’s lungs after vaping, which could better persuade an audience. 

Unfortunately, having the video only viewed as a commercial is a constraint in and of itself. While people see it involuntarily before the content they want to watch, they can often easily skip it to continue watching their desired content. Additionally, the commercial is a mere 17 seconds long, which raises the question if that time will persuade someone enough to make a real change in their lifestyle. 

While only being 17 seconds long, The Real Cost works to deliver its message in a concise and effective way. The creators of the video met the rhetorical situation by making the decision to include a metal monster which appeals to one’s logic as it helps audience members visualize the frightening contents of what they’re ingesting, and how damaging it is to their body. The Real Cost continues to appeal to its audience with frightening audio and visuals that directly engage one’s feelings with the hope that they begin to better understand the health dangers that are brought on as a result of ingesting toxic metals from vaping. In addition, with this campaign being launched by the FDA, the creators made another rhetorical decision that allows the audience to associate credibility with the message given by The Real Cost.  Even with a brief video, The Real Cost markets its video on all social media platforms, streaming services and live TV to ensure that its message will reach as many people as possible. 

The blend of symbolization and information in the commercial “Nothing is as Scary as the Facts”, support The Real Cost’s message of the growing need for teens to stop vaping and educate those on the horrific effects it can have on one’s body. The Real Cost exemplifies constraints of audience’s beliefs, medium, the dialogue of the commercial itself, and major corporations pushing young teens to vape. This demonstrates to viewers the exigence of teens vaping and permanently destroying their lungs needs to be identified, addressed and prevented. In launching the “Nothing is as Scary as the Facts” commercial, The Real Cost has taken a major step in responding to this rhetorical situation by informing the audience on the harmful effects of vaping. The hope is that if it can change the minds of even a small percentage of teens, it has served its purpose.The video has likely changed people’s opinions on vaping. Even if the commercial only impacts a certain percentage of teens and can convince them to stop or prevent them from starting, it has served the purpose of reducing harm and positively impacts the health of society. Even preventing  a small percentage of teens from vaping is a major step in the right direction.