COMM8190-22W-Sec1-Intercultural Communications

These problems involve two separate situations where the student will use language and genre choice to change the nature of an act of interpersonal communication and situate another form of communication within a different audience.

Problem #2: The student will be given a passage of writing that is targeted towards a specific audience. They will then need to rewrite the passage in order to change its target audience to a different demographic, (sub)culture, or generation. They are only permitted to do this through language choice alone and not by changing the meaning of the text they have been given. More specific details and the passage will be provided and accessed via the module for that week.

Keep in mind that what we know as culture is a mixture of place, people, and time period in which they live; as such, in order to change the effective culture of the original passage for this assignment, students will need to make a call on how to express this new time period, people, and location in the language they use.

In addition to the written component, the student will also hand in a brief author's note explaining their choices of no more than 250 words. In this author's note, they must explain the original time, place, and people targetted in the passage, in addition to identifying their new time, place, and people. They should include direct reference to the language used in their rewrite and the original to make these claims.

Problem #2 -

Rewriting Exercise

Take these two paragraphs from Vershawn Young's "Should Writers Use They Own English" and rewrite them from a new cultural perspective. Remember that culture is a mixture of time, place, and people, so be sure to identify the original audience (people), time period, and place of the original wording before you select a new cultural background for it. You are allowed to select whatever new cultural context you would like. You are also allowed to change the sentence structure, most words, and references as long as the passage retains its overall meaning. In this sense, whatever paragraph(s) you submit should still be about whether or not writers are allowed to use their own English. Be sure to also hand in an author's note discussing your choices. See rubric and assignment page for full details. Besides encouraging teachers to be snide and patronizing, Fish flat out confusin (I would say he lyin, but Momma say be nice). You cant start off sayin, disabuse yoself of the notion that students have a right to they dialect and then say to tell students: Yall do have a right. That be hypocritical. It further disingenuous of Fish to ask: Who could object to learning a second language? What he really mean by this rhetorical question is that the multiculturals should be thrilled to leave they own dialect and learn another one, the one he promote. If he meant everybody should be thrilled to learn another dialect, then wouldnt everybody be learnin everybodys dialect? Wouldnt we all become multidialectal and pluralingual? And thats my exact argument, that we all should know everybodys dialect, at least as many as we can, and be open to the mix of them in oral and written communication (Young). See, dont nobody all the time, nor do they in the same way subscribe to or follow standard modes of expression. Everybody mix the dialect they learn at home with whateva other dialect or language they learn afterwards. Thats how we understand accents; thats how we can hear that some people are from a Polish, Spanish, or French language background when they speak English. Its how we can tell somebody is from the South, from Appalachia, from Chicago or any other regional background. We hear that background in they speech, and its often expressed in they writin too. Its natural (Coleman).