- Mar 2022
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human.libretexts.org human.libretexts.org
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continue to explode definitions for what constitutes meaningful language and educated English.
Academic writing badly does not want to be changed, but our society changes with the times as people become more aware of racial and cultural division between different people. People of color and LGBTQ people are still fighting for their right to an equal education today, as well as for their history to be taught in schools. If kids continue to be taught their core subjects from the same straight and white point of view, what chance do they have of understanding much of current events now?
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writing handbooks like The Elements of Style were useless and that American students were being unfairly judged by a classed and arbitrary set of standards for their writing.
English teachers have argued for years that writing handbooks are biased against those who do not abide by Standard U.S. English rules. The cultural and ethnic backgrounds of all students must be respected and allowed to be brought into their writing if they so choose.
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Literacy is always attached to the deep ways of knowing embedded in language practices that are localized to different cultures.
Different cultures have their own folklore, stories, languages, and styles of writing. They should all be celebrated instead of some of them being made to feel like there is something wrong with part of their cultural identity/background.
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The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, is well loved by many writers and teachers as the ultimate reference book on Standard English. Ask any writer or editor, and they are likely to have one of its four editions on their bookshelves or will remember it from some phase of their education. A recent survey of over a million college syllabi showed that The Elements of Style is the number one, most-assigned book in English-speaking countries and is also listed in the top ten assigned texts for almost every discipline. It is difficult to imagine that a book this popular with college professors and currently ranked first in sales on four different Amazon lists originated as a 43-page, self-published pamphlet a century ago.
This first paragraph introduces the book that will be crucial to the reader's understanding of the rest of the passage, and it will later be revealed that the genre to which this book belongs is rooted in white supremacy.
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unethical and racist at worst.
Strunk and White's work set the standard in pre-Civil War America (when slavery was still legal). Nowadays, we must challenge their standard to include more writing for and by more diverse and less represented groups (Black, Latinx, Asian, Native American, LGBTQ, etc.)
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