DW3A

The reading I chose to analyze was Arnetha F. Ball's, "Expository Writing Patterns of African American Students". Right off the bat, she mentions how the failure to recognize and work with the unique cultural and societal situation of many African American students, has led to their failure in the educational system. She then says right on the 1st page, that "The focus of this article is to share information on how some AAVE speaking students have successfully utilized their language abilities...", which she does by giving examples from her teaching years. Mainly, she focuses on the work of four succesful 11th to 12th grade literary students, who were successful "culture-switchers" as she calls them.

Ball tries to make the point throughout the article, that these students (even though writing in Standard English a large majority of the time), have successful mixed in some rhetorical and even grammatical features of AAVE into their writing. She points to examples of double negatives, African American idioms like "coming up poor", and expresses how important "story telling" is in the writing style. Early on, she also tries to show that although educators may be a little more likely to grade a student down who uses a double negative, they, "would not, however, recognize that the student also used another characteristic feature of AAVE, repetition and skill in creating formulaic patterning...", simply because rhetorical features like this can be performed in SE. Another student uses the rapport feature by saying, "We use mendacity in our everyday lives...we use it to get out of certain situations", and by doing so, effectively maintains a form of communication with the audience and reader. Later on, Ball also gives examples in which these students write informal letters, in which their style of writing changes drastically. They omit 'g' endings on "-ing" words, use double negatives more frequently, and use expressions like "hey girl", which one would obviously stray away from in an academic setting. The important thing about showing these letters though, is that the students still articulate their thoughts very consisely, and make the writing interesting with spices of both rhetorical and grammatical AAVE features.

Throughout the article, Ball is reluctant to make any extensive plan as to how AAVE could be incorporated into composition studies. She simply says that the incorporation of AAVE (especially the more "teacher-acceptable" rhetorical features), could allow for some African American students to feel more comfortable writing, and help them improve on their writing skills in general, while learning to code-switch effectively. However, she fails to really give any concrete way in which teachers could allow for this. Would the teacher show the entire class such rhetorical features and praise the usage of them if done correctly? Furthermore, if African American students were to use grammatical elements of AAVE that are more widely criticized (like double negatives), would the teacher mark them down for that? Are all of the features of AAVE to be accepted by teachers, or only some of them? One of the things that I found to be quite surprising is that the students in her examples often used "patterns" that went against teh "five-paragraph" format. To me, it really seems like many educators would not allow for that at all, since they are often looking for a "structured" essay by their definition of structured. Ball doesn't really explain all of this, and even though she does not state giving a program for future education in composition studies as one of the goals of her article, it really takes away from the overall effectiveness of her point. Still, in general, the use of four success stories and being able to see how articulate the sentences are even when different AAVE rhetorical and grammatical features are added, does show that AAVE can be used in conjunction with SE in writing, in order to produce work that is more than just acceptable by most, but also very unique and strong.