Why Deny Speakers of African American Language a Choice Most of Us Offer Other Students?
Mainstream teachers commonly invite mainstream students to freewrite and use very informal language for early and mid drafts of important academic essays–and hold off surface editing till the end. This amounts to inviting mainstream students to do lots of writing in their spoken vernacular–and to wait till the end to edit into a clearly different dialect: edited (“correct standard”) written English. This essay argues the same approach for speakers of African American Language–and addresses objections.
