• Theatrical Training & Multimodal Composition
• Assumptions, Audience, & Access
• Voice, Culture, Language, & Dialect

Being an effective communicator means more than not making mistakes. It often means engaging your entire body. It means knowing when to follow and when to flout rules. It means being aware of and responsive to the culture in which communication is created and interpreted. It means knowing how to be perceived as part of a community because of the dialect or variation of English you select. This section of the book asks you to try new ideas that will help you become a more effective communicator.

To learn more about the nonverbal mode and the ways our bodies influence our communication, view Amy Cuddy’s TED talk “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are.”

Theatrical Training & Multimodal Composition

You’ve probably taken several years’ worth of high school English classes that taught you the basics of writing. But have you ever studied oral and nonverbal communication? Most students arrive at Georgia Tech with little training in these modes: a public speaking course here, a dance class there, a few performances in school plays, or maybe nothing. As a WOVEN teacher, I think that’s a problem, but also an opportunity. You might never have thought about how to use your voice and body more effectively. If you’re a relative beginner, you can make a lot of progress very quickly. But if you are a beginner, you might also be asking, “How do I get better at nonverbal communication and public performance?” Your English 1101 and English 1102 courses can help you develop your awareness of these elements and maybe even gain some practice performing.

In this special section of WOVENText, Dr. Jonathan Kotchian speaks directly to you about ways to strengthen your oral and nonverbal composing and communication. He uses his training as an actor to help you understand performance and nonverbal communication beyond the oral presentation.

I trained for years as an actor at Yale University, and I draw on that training to teach my English class as a performance workshop several times each semester. If you were to visit these special workshops in my class, here are some of the things you might see:

• Physical and vocal warm-ups
• Movement and dance experiments
• Improvisation games
• Observation exercises
• Imagination training
• Scene study
• Discussion of literary characters’ motivations and actions

All of this work, in addition to being fun, is designed to change the ways students think about the oral and nonverbal modes. You should think about your work in these modes as performances—think like an actor does when preparing and enacting a role. To do this effectively, you need to distinguish between this performance model and a more traditional presentation model. Learning how to give a good business presentation or an academic research talk is a valuable skill. However, oral and nonverbal communication involves more than just this approach to presentations. Too much focus on the presentation model might limit you because it often prescribes a narrow range for your voice and body: think of the stereotypically serious, polished, commanding “good” public speaker standing behind a podium and microphone. Following that stereotype can lead you to think too much about errors, about fixing what you’re doing wrong. Worrying too much about making mistakes can get in the way of your natural creativity.

Have you been to a presentation or performance lately that you thought was particularly effective? What elements of nonverbal communication made the experience memorable?
#Remember
#Evaluate

My teaching of composition and my teaching of acting share a goal: making natural a role and circumstances that at first seem difficult and artificial. Weak essays, weak speeches, or weak performances might seem empty because the authors/speakers/actors are only going through the motions, trying to sound “right” without really making the role their own. By contrast, the audience doesn’t perceive strong actors/speakers/authors as trying at all; the performances seem natural, as though they were not pretense but real. This kind of natural performance can be learned through actor training using the tradition of the Stanislavski system. This method of acting aims at truthful performances in which you actually feel and express vocally and physically the emotions of your character rather than merely indicating them. To achieve this goal, you must imagine yourself in the character’s shoes, picturing what the character sees, hearing what the character hears; you must clearly identify the character’s motivation or objective to be able to act and react as your character would. When you’ve successfully imagined and internalized this life, you don’t have to laboriously ponder the ways you ought to walk, talk, or create your facial expressions. These elements of the performance emerge intuitively and organically, just as they do in real life.

Creativity and expression are easier when you’re not too worried about getting it wrong. If you’re self-consciously trying to conform to preconceived rules of being a good speaker, your performance may become unnatural. However, since we don’t have any rules for being a dragon, you may naturally find yourself speaking loudly and clearly with a confident command of the space.

Extending this system to nontheatrical contexts is a matter of “getting into the part,” even when you’re writing essays, creating Web sites, or making professional speeches. Sometimes, the role you play isn’t that different from your own: “academic writer,” “business professional,” “architect,” “engineer,” or “scientist.” Sometimes, though, you need to think of ways to expand your range as a speaker and presenter by trying sharply different roles. For example, I might tell a writer in English 1101 or English 1102 to try writing as George Orwell for a while, assign a student reading King Lear to attempt the part of Goneril, or even ask a shy speaker to try being a dragon. Regardless of the role, students go through the same imaginative steps, getting into the part as naturally as possible. As a result, their multimodal projects look and sound more natural and better motivated. I’ll show you what I mean. What would happen if I suddenly threw a ball at your head?

Would you consciously calculate exactly how to move your body to catch (or dodge) the ball? No. You’d just react in the moment. Your movements would emerge naturally and organically from the circumstances. In fact, you’d do a much better job of catching/dodging than you would have if you’d stopped to analyze your movements and the possible mistakes you might make. Most American actors are trained to access this kind of organic “composition,” to stay involved in the present moment. Once they immerse themselves in a role, they can act and react naturally, without thinking, letting the subconscious take over. They give more creative and more effective performances as a result. Your goal is to find ways to learn to act naturally, even in roles and circumstances that might at first seem difficult and artificial.

Acting Naturally

Acting naturally may be easier said than done. In fact, when you have to move and speak in front of others, you sometimes feel tense, unnatural, and very self-conscious, especially in situations where the stakes are high and the fear of failure is strong. You can call this “stage fright” if you want to, and I think everyone knows what it’s like—when you walk into a party alone and you don’t know anyone, maybe? Or when you try to start a conversation with someone you’re interested in romantically? The awkwardness can hurt your performance; you might end up stuttering, mumbling, or even tripping over yourself. The great Russian teacher Constantin Stanislavski (the inventor of the Stanislavski method mentioned earlier) tells a story in his book An Actor Prepares that helps us understand the oppressive effects of intense, awkward self-consciousness and also helps us see how we can move past them. His narrative persona (the novice actor, Kostya) is terrified by the idea of everyone in a large theater watching him:

I went out to the front of the stage and stared into the awful hole beyond the footlights, trying to become accustomed to it and to free myself from its pull, but the more I tried not to notice the place the more I thought about it. Just then a workman who was going by me dropped a package of nails. I started to help pick them up. As I did this, I had the very pleasant sensation of feeling quite at home on the big stage. But the nails were soon picked up, and again I became oppressed by the size of the place. (7)

The trick, as Kostya discovers, is that if you can genuinely focus on something (or someone) else, you’ll forget about yourself. You won’t be thinking about your voice and body anymore, and you can get out of your own way. I usually call that someone/something else a source, to emphasize that an actor can react to it and draw energy from it, instead of focusing on herself or himself. A source is usually another person, but it can also be a physical object or even an image, something you picture in your mind’s eye. What should you do when you feel self-conscious or paralyzed? Re-invest in your source; attend to those dropped nails, to your partner, or to your visualized image. If you can do this, you’ll feel quite at home in any role, whether playing a Shakespearean role, confidently walking into a party, or giving an engaging product pitch to potential investors.

Borrowing from Kristin Linklater’s widely used manual for actors, Freeing the Natural Voice, you can think about this work as “freeing,” reminding yourself that you don’t need to force anything because your bigger range already exists in potential. Recall a time when relaxing led to more effective communication with your audience. #Remember

Relieving Tension

Any exercise you can do to relieve tension helps because tension can imprison your voice and body in a tiny jail cell. That’s the most important lesson of my physical and vocal warm-ups. Rather than teaching my students to put in more effort to “project” their voices or muscle up their bodies, I instead try to get them to relax. This is particularly important to Georgia Tech students, 90 percent of whom described themselves in 2011 as “very stressed,” compared to a 53 percent national average for all students. (Read the full text of the “Mental Health Task Force’s Report and Recommendations” from October 2013 to discover what Georgia Tech proposes to do to create a healthier environment on campus. Search for it by name on the Institute’s main Web site.)

You can try the following warm-up (or something similar) on your own: I usually start with a vigorous shaking-out of the limbs, asking my students to flail about generally, then, before they have a chance to worry about how they look, we do a “spine-fold”: a standing collapse, bending from the hips, letting the head and arms dangle freely; then we build the spine back up, veerrry slowly, vertebra by vertebra, until the head floats up and the shoulders roll back; then a giant sigh. Almost everyone feels a little better, more awake, more observant, less worried.

I give extra focus to two major trouble spots: the jaw and the belly. Most of us have been taught since childhood to hold these areas in an artificial tension: we hold our mouths closed to avoid tongue-lolling and drooling, and we suck in our guts so as not to look fat. We’re more presentable that way, but these actions clamp down on vital resonating areas. Bouncing and shaking these areas—at first with unvoiced sighs, then with voiced sighs—helps to expand the voice’s range. Most people are accustomed to living their entire lives using only a very narrow range of both voice and body, but we’re capable of much more once freed from some of our tension. Instead of replacing our existing narrow range with a “correct” one that’s just as narrow—a risk of using the stereotypical presentation model—our goal should be to develop the maximum possible range of our physical instruments. “Try softer,” I tell my students if they become frustrated.

Sending Action

Probably the most important performance concept I teach is called “sending action.” This vocabulary comes from my practical theater work, especially from my studies with James DePaul, Bill Walters, James Luse, Michael Tracy, and Alison Chase. If the action is X, sending or releasing X is making your source feel X. For example, you might make the source feel excited, scared, weird, or beautiful.

Rather than indicating how she herself is supposedly feeling—trying to contort her face, body, and voice into an artificial imitation of, say, pain—the actor instead invests in her source, trying to make the other person feel X, where X is “mean” for inflicting the pain, or “powerful” enough to cause the pain, or “merciful” as the other person comes to her aid. Sending “mean” is a way for her to play “I’m angry or aggressive or in pain” more organically, with her attention on her source, not herself. Conscious indication is unnecessary; the face, body, and voice naturally express the emotion without the actor thinking about it. You’ve probably realized by now that action isn’t something only actors use; we can all think of ourselves as sending actions all the time, as we live our lives. Whenever you’ve made a connection to a source, you’re sending action, no matter the circumstances—academic, professional, personal. That’s vital to acting naturally.

Here’s how I teach sending action: my class gathers in a circle, and each student tries to send action to another, one at a time. Each student picks a source across the circle and sends that person action X (I start off with easy ones, like “ugly” or “amazing”) while saying some nonsense text. To keep students’ attention off the way they look and sound, I have them throw an inflatable ball around the circle as they send each action. They know how to throw a ball, just as Kostya knows how to pick up nails. I ask them to increase their actions’ specificity and urgency by using Stanislavski’s magic if. Try imagining something extreme: how would you send the action “scared,” if you had only seconds to save your source’s life by frightening that person away from an electrified fence? I follow this work with a partner exercise designed to open students up to truthful emotional connection: you might find a trusted friend and try speaking the text “I could really be hurt by you” while sending chosen actions such as “loved” or “hated.” After a while—as the photos in “Performance in Oral and Nonverbal Modes” on pages 262–263 show—you’ll gain confidence in identifying the actions sent by others and in responding to them naturally.

Consider your own facial expressions, body language, and vocal expressiveness. Using what you’ve learned in this chapter, decide what your greatest strengths are. #Evaluate

Creating a Role

When creating a role, whether it is Goneril or “savvy business person,” ask yourself these five questions:

1. Who am I?
2. Where am I?
3. What do I want?
4. How do I go about getting what I want?
5. What do I do after I do/don’t get what I want?

The third question is the most important because it makes you define your objective, or motivation. The objective, in turn, leads you to choose certain actions (the answer to question 4). For example, as King Lear’s daughter Goneril, I might want Lear to get out of my house; this would be my objective. As my scene progressed and my circumstances (developed through questions 1 and 2) changed, I would try different actions to achieve the objective. I might send to Lear the action “powerful,” then “presumptuous,” then “stupid,” then “frightened,” and finally “annihilated,” matching these with my spoken lines. When working with a dramatic scene, I ask my students to identify only one objective per scene, but choose several actions that might help them get what they want; this helps to create a natural variety in performance. We also examine the ways different performance choices might lead to different literary interpretations.

You can treat as a role—even something less obviously theatrical, like a business presentation—and prepare the role by answering the questions above. If you don’t feel confident or authoritative enough in making a sales pitch, for example, you might place yourself into the role of Star Trek’s Captain Picard (minus the accent), or you might instead imagine a businessman, “Joey Pitcheroo,” much more experienced and slicker than yourself. You could then choose the objective and actions that Joey might use to make his sale. This technique might help you discover a counterintuitive, but effective, action. Instead of sucking up to them, you might decide to make your audience feel “not even cool enough to buy my product!” and moreover imagine them as overeager schoolchildren instead of corporate executives. Exercises like these allow us to range far beyond the stereotypical presentation personae. Imagining 30 of your character’s likes and dislikes is one way to ensure specificity in preparing a role; it’s essential not to skimp on the imaginative work, as it’s what creates the broad range of possibilities for performance.

When we use the above techniques to perform a role, are we really acting genuinely and truthfully? After all, the role is still a role. Doesn’t that suggest at least some artificiality? Perhaps, but consider that metaphor we sometimes use for the work of an actor expertly playing a part: we say that he has “made the role his own.” Those words suggest that a role can become, in a way, part of the performer. Consider the role of “academic writer,” one with which you’re familiar. Most professional scholars have successfully made this role their own. I think of my “academic writer” persona as an aspect of myself because I actually think and feel the things I write, even if I write them in a style different from the one I use in ordinary conversation. Yes, I frequently alter my writing to fit various circumstances, but I’m not being fake. The role is second nature to me now. I’m being genuine in a different way, one I’ve had to figure out as I go along.

How will you make your own academic performances genuine and truthful? #Apply

Once you understand that a valid part of your job is figuring out the gritty details of getting into the part—how to stop faking it, how to more naturally perform your thinking, reading, writing, speaking, and moving—you might feel liberated. Attending to your own processes of self-transformation, rather than attempting to conceal, rush, or deny them, removes the burden of pretense, as you no longer feel compelled to construct a false front to please your teacher. Rather, you can reflect on how you wish to fit into your new roles, how to inhabit them organically, and how to use them as the means to explore projects of your own. Your life as a student, professional, and human being may be more fully and truthfully lived as a result.

I’d like to leave you with another passage from Stanislavski. The story that follows, from Stanislavski’s autobiography, My Life In Art, explains the difference between fake work and truthful work—not only in the theater, but in composition, literature, and beyond. Understanding those differences and creating presentations that are themselves truthful will make a difference in your life.

Excerpt from Stanislavski’s Autobiography, My Life In Art:

This took place on our estate, about thirty versts from Moscow, in one of the wings of our house. A small children’s stage was erected there, with a plaid cloth instead of a curtain. As custom has it, the entertainment was composed of tableaux, in this case the four seasons of the year. I was about two or three years old at that time, and impersonated Winter. The stage was covered with cotton; in the centre there was a small evergreen, also covered with cotton, and on the floor, wrapped in a fur coat, with a fur hat on my head, and a long beard that would insist on crawling up my forehead, sat I, without knowing where to look and what to do. This impression of aimlessness, bashfulness and the absurdity of my presence on the stage, was felt by me subconsciously at that time, and even now it is alive in me and frightens me when I am on the stage. After the applause, which I remember was very much to my liking, I was placed on the stage again, but in a different pose. A candle was lit and placed in a small bundle of branches to make the effect of a fire, and I was given a small piece of wood, which I was to make believe I put into the fire.

“Remember, it is only make-believe. It is not in earnest,” the others explained to me.

And I was strictly forbidden to bring the piece of wood close to the candlelight. All this seemed nonsensical to me. Why should I only make believe when I could really put the wood into the fire? And perhaps that was what I had to do, just because I was forbidden to do it?

In a word, as soon as the curtain rose, I put out the hand with the piece of wood towards the fire with great interest and curiosity. It was easy and pleasant to do this, for there was meaning in the motion; it was a completely natural and logical action. Even more natural and logical was the fact that the cotton caught fire. There was a great deal of excitement and noise. I was unceremoniously lifted from the stage and carried into the big house, where I was severely scolded. In short I had failed cruelly, and the failure was not to my taste. These four impressions, of the pleasure of success, of the bitterness of failure, of the discomfort of unreasonable presence on the stage, and the inner truth of reasoned presence and action on it, control me on the stage even at the present day. (23–24)

Works Cited

Linklater, Kristin. Freeing the Natural Voice. Hollywood: Drama Publishers, 2006.

Stanislavski, Constantin. An Actor Prepares. Trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. New York: Routledge, 1989.

—My Life in Art. Trans J. J. Robbins. Cleveland: Meridian, 1963.

Assumptions, Audience, & Access

“Assumptions, Audience, and Access” was contributed by Dr. Britta Spann, a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow alumna at Georgia Tech.

Although we rarely give assumptions conscious thought, we almost constantly make them. Assumptions are rooted in inductive reasoning: when something seems obvious or proves to be true often enough, people begin to treat it as fact. Doing so provides a foundation of knowledge: without assuming that scientific laws are true and that mathematical theorems are valid, for example, our culture would make little technological progress. Similarly, people would have trouble functioning in our daily lives if we had to verify each of our beliefs or perceptions before acting on it.

Inductive reasoning: movement from general conclusion to individual instances; conclusion probably follows from the premises.

Deductive reasoning: movement from individual instances to general conclusion; conclusion necessarily follows from the premises.

Not questioning every assumption is convenient and reasonable. For instance, we can rationally assume that a sturdy-looking chair will not collapse when someone sits on it. However, if one of the legs falls off the chair and sends a person sprawling on the ground, the fact that the initial assumption was incorrect in one particular instance does not mean it is necessary to question the sturdiness of every chair. We can reasonably continue to assume that sturdy-looking chairs are generally sturdy (and that exceptions are rare).

The same holds true for the assumptions made in communication: all communication includes assumptions about audience. You usually don’t give conscious thought to these assumptions, and you don’t need to examine every assumption. However, when one of your assumptions, no matter how reasonable, proves incorrect, the result can be somewhat like sitting in a chair that breaks—something that you relied on falls apart, you look a bit silly, and ultimately you fail to accomplish your purpose.

Assumptions are inherent in each rhetorical appeal (ethos, pathos, logos). For instance, let’s say that I am making dinner plans with a friend and want to convince her to go to a particular pizza restaurant. If I appeal to ethos by telling her that a local food critic gave it five stars, I am taking it for granted that she will consider the critic a credible authority. This could be a fair assumption, depending on the critic’s reputation, but my friend’s acceptance of the argument depends on her personal opinion. If I appeal to logos by pointing out that the restaurant is selling large pepperoni pizzas for half price, I am assuming that she likes pepperoni pizza and will consider the low price a compelling reason to visit the restaurant. This is a reasonable assumption given the food’s popularity and the fact that most people value a good deal. However, my argument will fail if my friend is a gluten-intolerant vegan. If I burst into tears and say not eating at the restaurant will ruin my day, I am assuming that my friend will feel pity and be persuaded by my appeal to pathos. Such an assumption is generally unreasonable—most people would probably not sympathize with an adult who claims that her happiness depends on pizza—but the assumption could be correct, depending on my friend’s personality. If my friend finds my behavior obnoxious, my faulty assumption invalidates my argument and, moreover, damages my credibility.

Assumptions & Inclusivity

When you have close relationships with people, you tend to know their personalities, values, likes and dislikes, life experiences, and subject positions. These elements contribute to a nuanced understanding of the rhetorical situations in which you communicate. When you do not know your audience well (or at all), you are likely to draw from your own perceptions and experiences to fill in the information. Because your perceptions and experiences are limited, you might overlook crucial details. The less you know about audience members, the more likely you are to make incorrect assumptions about them. The extent to which a faulty assumption damages your communication depends on how well your audience knows you: if I ask a friend who practices Judaism what he received for Christmas (mistakenly assuming that he observes a holiday originating in the Christian tradition), he might focus more on my good intentions than my oversight and gently correct me. A casual acquaintance or stranger, on the other hand, could perceive me as ignorant and even find my question offensive.

Here, subject position refers to the combination of qualities such as race, gender, sexual identity, age, and socioeconomic status that contributes to your identity.

English 1101 and English 1102 help you develop your ability to evaluate rhetorical situations and your ability to choose effective communication strategies, but you need to pay careful attention to assumptions about your audience, your classmates, and your instructor. The following practices can help you avoid making false assumptions by making your communication more inclusive of the many types of diversity that might exist among your audience members.

Be mindful. The more you pay attention to your own performance of assumptions, the more likely you are to avoid mistakes and to improve your strategies. Simply putting conscious effort into recognizing your assumptions can help you adjust those that might be invalid. Over time, you’ll likely find that your ability to make accurate assumptions improves as you become familiar with more rhetorical situations.

Leave room for exceptions. Be wary of using all-encompassing language: Could “anyone” really perform a given action? Is “everyone” truly familiar with a concept? Do “students” (which implies all students) really face a particular challenge? Qualifiers such as “generally,” “often,” and “tend to” make diction broad and inclusive. On the other hand, language that is exclusive fails to take certain groups of people into account, thus implying that they do not exist or that their experiences do not matter. A speaker who makes faulty assumptions about inclusion or exclusion might appear insensitive or even alienate audience members. A strategy for avoiding exclusive assumptions during planning and revising is to ask yourself questions such as “What type of person might not have experienced this situation?” or “Who might have trouble relating to this example?”

Be especially cautious when using the second-person perspective. Directly addressing the reader with “you” or asking the audience to do something, such as imagine a scenario, can make one’s communication more engaging. To engage students using this textbook, the authors frequently use “you” because the word directly addresses students using the book as part of their work in English 1101 and English 1102. However, directly addressing the reader with “you” can also be a risk. If the earlier analogy had said, “we can rationally assume that a sturdy-looking chair will not collapse when you sit on it,” the sentence would exclude people who are not physically able to do so. Even seemingly innocent phrases such as “as you can see” or “you will be able” can exclude audience members unable to see or do what you claim. Words and phrases that allow room for exceptions are helpful.

Seek information about your audience. Knowledge is power. If you are communicating with live audience members, their body language and even the sounds they make can provide valuable information. Hypothetically, you might reasonably assume that some touches of humor could engage the audience’s interest at the beginning of a speech only to find yourself facing an audience full of stern, serious faces and impatiently tapping feet. In that case, you might rethink your assumption and skip your opening joke, getting straight to your main point instead. You can conduct research in advance to identify useful information. Reading about the culture of a country that you are planning to visit could help you avoid behaviors that you assume to be polite or friendly but that are traditionally considered rude or offensive, such as showing up on time for a dinner invitation in Argentina, smiling at strangers in Russia, or giving someone a thumbs-up in Iran.

Ask questions. While you will not always be able to ask your audience questions, doing so is often an effective strategy for gaining information. Sometimes you may have difficulty determining whether an assumption is valid. A student giving an oral presentation about the Battle of Gettysburg might, in looking over her audience before she begins, realize that she cannot assume that her peers, many of whom are international students, will have already learned about the U.S. Civil War. Starting her presentation by asking the audience how many are familiar with the battle could help her determine how much background information to include.

Consider the size of the audience. The larger an audience, the more diverse it is likely to be. Your audience members might seem to have many things in common, but even if you are writing a blog accessible only to blond-haired female electrical engineers from Atlanta who are allergic to cats and drive white Honda Accords, they will have different opinions and experiences. If only three people who fit this description visit your blog, you might safely assume that all of them enjoy their jobs, but if you were to have 3 million visitors, your assumption is likely to be incorrect. The greater the diversity of the audience, the less information you can assume to be universal among the members, so when you plan and create a multimodal artifact, consider the amount and types of diversity that might be present in your audience.

Making Communication Accessible

Each mode of communication assumes that the audience can access it: a written text, for example, takes for granted that the audience is literate. However, access is sometimes more complicated. Many people experience temporary or permanent conditions that impair their ability to access a given mode of communication. For example, people who have visual impairments may struggle to read standard-size fonts. People who have auditory impairments may have difficulty understanding a speaker if even a slight amount of background noise in the room exists. You almost certainly have communicated with such audiences. To make your texts as widely accessible as possible, you can make a conscious effort to apply universal design principles to your work.

Universal design is the concept of making objects and environments that enable access by all people, regardless of ability or disability. Elevators and wheelchair ramps are examples of universal design features. If a building were constructed without these features, some people with movement disorders would be unable to travel between floors or even to enter the building on their own. Universal design features are potentially beneficial to all users: taking an elevator rather than navigating stairs can help a person who has a sore ankle, is pushing a stroller, or is carrying a heavy load. Similarly, applying universal design principles to an artifact can benefit all members of an audience: a set of instructions that includes diagrams in addition to written text provides users who cannot read a way to access the information, but diagrams could also clarify the directions for those who prefer visual learning.

The communication strategies covered in this text embody universal design principles. The guidance you receive about such elements of visual design as font size and the use of color, for example, can help you make a PowerPoint, poster, or Prezi more readable and appealing to your general audience. However, making effective choices could also determine whether your work is legible to someone who is visually impaired or color-blind. Moreover, multimodality can be a universal design feature. Presenting information in several modes provides multiple means of access. Below are some specific examples that illustrate the ways multimodality can facilitate access for audience members who have conditions that may impair their ability to interpret and use texts:

• Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). ADHD is a disorder that affects people’s ability to focus. People with ADHD tend to be easily distracted and often take longer on average to process information. They have an “attention battery” that does not hold its charge well. Primarily oral or written modes of communication tend to require sustained focus, quickly draining that battery; people with ADHD become distracted as their attention is pulled in new directions. Communicating information in several modes provides people with ADHD an opportunity to shift their attention without being distracted from an artifact. Visual elements are especially productive for conveying information to people with ADHD. Pictures or graphs in an essay, video clips embedded in a Prezi, or the hand gestures of a speaker provide a break from processing purely written or oral information, allowing audience members with ADHD to recharge their attention battery.

Tools of Scholarship

Sometimes disabilities are minor and visible. Other times, disabilities are major and not necessarily visible. Universal design helps everyone access your information.

Amanda Mills/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

• Aural and Visual Impairments. An artifact that communicates information through both visual and auditory elements is accessible to people who experience an impairment of one of those senses. Electronic communication is one of the most efficient ways to produce and disseminate such texts. Unlike a printed hard copy of an essay, an electronic document can be read aloud by a universal reader application. Similarly, whereas a simple oral explanation of a process might not clearly convey the information to someone with a hearing impairment, playing a video that animates the process while one describes it could.
• Dyslexia. Dyslexia is a language processing disorder that affects one’s ability to read and write. The brain of a person with dyslexia has difficulty recognizing and deciphering letters, numbers, and words. Characters might appear upside down or backward, the spacing between words and letters might be disrupted, text might appear distorted or move about the screen, and orientations might change, causing a writer to begin writing upside down or backward. Often, multiple symptoms are present at once. To a person with dyslexia, the first sentence of this paragraph could look something like this: Dy slxeia isalau gnage dro cessingbisor der taht af fe cst oue’sadil ity to rbae or rwtei. Presenting ideas in more than one form facilitates access. Dyslexia specifically affects written information, so oral and nonverbal visual communication are beneficial; as with ADHD, dyslexia can cause the brain to tire quickly, so images and audio clips often provide welcome breaks. Electronic media can be readily adapted to incorporate both visual and auditory elements. Further, they can allow viewers to make changes; many people with dyslexia find reading easier if the background behind the text has a slight tint or if certain fonts are used.

When Ability Is Impaired

If you have been diagnosed with a condition that affects your ability to communicate or to understand communication in one or more modes, then you have probably devised strategies for coping with the challenges you face and might even have requested official accommodations from your previous school, from Georgia Tech, or from an employer. However, no system of accommodation can be perfect. Further, impairments (temporary or permanent) can happen unexpectedly—you might find yourself losing your voice on the day of a presentation or simply unable to focus your attention due to stress or insufficient sleep. The information and strategies that follow offer ideas that can help you communicate more effectively when you face such limitations. (If you have any kind of disability, contact the Office of Disability Services at Georgia Tech, discussed later.)

Apply universal design principles. If you have difficulty communicating fluently in a given mode, devise ways to supplement your communication with other modalities. If you have a speech disorder or will be perceived by your audience as having a strong accent, you can use visual and nonverbal communication to facilitate the audience’s comprehension during an oral presentation. For example, you could include a short video clip to explain a concept that you might struggle to articulate out loud. Similarly, if you struggle with written communication, you can use pictures or graphs to supplement written descriptions and explanations.

Make the planning process multimodal. You have likely been advised, if not trained, to use prewriting strategies such as brainstorming, visual note taking, freewriting on a topic, and outlining to help you devise, refine, and organize ideas before you begin drafting a written assignment. For some people with ADHD, dyslexia, and verbal processing disorders, these activities seem like obstacles. If writing is already a challenge, how can more writing make it easier? If this question resonates with you or if you don’t find prewriting activities helpful, experiment with shifting the modality. Rather than writing a list of potential topics for an essay or freewriting about a topic to refine a thesis, turn on a recorder and start talking. Recording gives you access to your ideas later, so you do not have to worry about forgetting anything you talk about. Instead of writing an outline, record yourself talking through your ideas or, even better, record a conversation with a willing friend or colleague. The flow of ideas in the conversation could provide clues about an effective organizational strategy.

Customize your composition & revision processes. Obviously, you would not want to turn in a lab report written in 20-point boldfaced font and printed on pink paper. But you can certainly draft it that way. Compose and revise your work in a format that you find easy to access. You could, for example, highlight your entire text in light blue before revising if the stark contrast between black font and white background causes you visual strain. If, like some people with dyslexia, you find the infamous Comic Sans font easier to read than Times New Roman, go ahead and use it (Dyslexia Style Guide). Once you have finished making your revisions, you can adjust the document’s formatting to ensure that your work has a professionally appropriate appearance.

Advocate for yourself. According to the U.S. government’s ADA Web site, “the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) prohibits discrimination and ensures equal opportunity for persons with disabilities in employment, state and local government services, public accommodations, commercial facilities, and transportation.” If you are granted accommodations by your employer or school in compliance with the ADA, those accommodations are not suggestions or tips: they are your civil right. You also have a right to request reasonable accommodations if you have a documented disability. Unfortunately, some ill-informed people talk about some accommodations as though they were “special treatment”; these people do not understand that giving extra time on quizzes to someone with ADHD is like providing a ramp to someone in a wheelchair. If you encounter a boss or professor with such an attitude, do not take it personally, and prepare yourself for the possibility of having to politely, but firmly, insist on your accommodations. If you are refused, notify the appropriate party (Human Resources at your job or the Office of Disability Services at Georgia Tech) as soon as possible.

Remember that accommodations can change. Typically, accommodations are decided based on what is standard and on what a specific person has been granted in the past, so they may not account for your particular circumstances. If you know that a certain accommodation could help you, such as being allowed to take notes with a laptop in class, ask for it—explain to your professor or to an Office of Disability Services official how the accommodation could improve your experience and why you think it would be reasonable. Even if you don’t get exactly what you have requested, you might still be able to improve your situation. If nothing else, you are helping your professor, school, or employer better understand your needs.

Finally, encourage yourself not to settle. Many people never seek accommodations that would benefit them because they can make do without them. You’ll experience a world of difference, however, between getting by and excelling. You might easily be able to pass a test or perform a job function without accommodations, but what if having them allowed you to earn an A or achieve a promotion? You might even discover that you have a natural aptitude you never expected. Impaired ability or disability is not the same as inability.

Resources & Tools

The Office of Disability Services at Georgia Tech will help determine and coordinate your accommodations if you have a documented disability. They can also assist you with questions about acquiring accommodations and testing for disabilities.

Dyslexia-friendly fonts exist and are continually being improved. Dyslexia Reading Well provides a thorough list of the fonts that people with dyslexia find easiest to read as well as links to downloadable fonts designed especially for people with dyslexia.

Storyboard That is a free online program for creating storyboards, a multimodal alternative to the traditional outline that you might find especially useful for planning comics, graphic novels, videos, or even written narratives.

Universal reader software programs such as Universal Reader Plus and Jaws convert text to speech. Some are only compatible with certain types of files while others will read any text on the screen, which can be beneficial for revising work. Programs vary tremendously in quality, price, and the number of functions available, so do research before downloading and, especially, before purchasing any program.

Voice-recognition software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking transcribes spoken words to written text and can thus be of great use to people whose ability to write is impaired by a physical or neurological condition. As with universal readers, research is necessary to find the program best-suited to your individual needs.

Works Cited

2010 ADA Regulations. N.p., n.d. 28 Nov. 2014.

“Dyslexia Font and Styles.” Dyslexia Reading Well. N.p., n.d. 28 Nov. 2014.

“Dyslexia Style Guide.” British Dyslexia Association. N.p., n.d. 28 Nov. 2014.

Voice, Culture, Language, & Dialect

Considering your communication style includes more than thinking about your performance and role or acknowledging and adapting to linguistic difference and bias. As an effective communicator, you need to thoughtfully use language to help you craft your artifacts. The next three subsections discuss important questions you need to answer and practical techniques for using language as part of your communication process, including establishing your voice, addressing cultural factors, and considering dialects and languages. For further help with writing and communication, you should consult an online handbook such as the Purdue Online Writing Lab or Writing Commons, make an appointment in the Communication Center (in Clough), and use class-related resources such as your instructor’s office hours and the course’s Canvas site or Web site.

Linguistic culture involves more than oral and written language. Let’s consider two dramatically different kinds of language that are an important part of the world in which you live, study, and work. These examples are drawn together with poetry. The first example involves what is called interlanguage, a system that allows speakers to use the familiar sounds of their native language to be combined in new ways that enable them to speak an entirely unfamiliar language. The second example involves American Sign Language (ASL), which is a distinct language used by many people. As you watch these two examples online, reflect on the ideas about voice, culture, dialects, and languages, thinking as well about how interlanguage and ASL broaden your understanding of WOVEN communication.

Voice

“Voice, Culture, Language, and Dialect” was contributed by Dr. Malavika Shetty, a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow alumna at Georgia Tech. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin.

Each genre, whether narrative, informative, or persuasive, permits certain voices but considers others atypical, ignorant, or offensive. Voice in this section refers to the way you address your audience using diction, tone, grammar, and other verbal and nonverbal factors. In many ways, voice and audience are critically connected: your choice of voice is determined by the intended audience for your communication. As a writer and communicator, you must learn how to adjust your voice to reach your audience. Simply put, all communication efforts fail if your audience is not persuaded to participate.

In your academic writing, you can usually assume that your primary audience is your instructor; however, your instructor also represents your intended audience, so you still have to adjust your voice accordingly. For a formal essay or report, you generally assume that your audience is composed of informed, scholarly readers who have some background knowledge about your topic. Therefore, your voice is formal and the grammar is conventional; your tone might be persuasive. However, your instructor might give you an assignment that requests you to address a different audience—a publisher or editorial board, a committee of venture capitalists, a group of teenagers, or a prospective employer—which would require you to modify your voice to best reach that person or demographic.

You should modulate your voice in academic writing, which is easier in a formal context than when you are using social media. Emails, blogs, text messages, and Facebook posts all have an informal feeling to them, and you might be tempted to use an informal voice when communicating online. However, remember that your voice is determined by the audience, not just by the conventions of the genre, mode, or medium. Use the conventions to help you approach your audience in the way its members expect, but carefully consider the kind of relationship you want to create with those members. If you want to build credibility as a source of important information, you might choose a more formal voice.

Modulating your speaking voice means both varying your vocal intensity (literally, high and low) and adjusting your diction and grammar to the context, purpose, and audience. Modulating your writing voice also means varying your intensity—for example, adjusting diction, grammar, and other factors (e.g., punctuation, graphic elements such as bullets and boxes, and page layout).

Since online forms of communication (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, and blogs) offer an immediate availability to the audience that formal writing (e.g., journal articles, books, and essays) does not, don’t let the speed of sending trick you into forgetting to carefully select your approach, voice, tone, and language. Email, for example, can be an informal “what’s up” for friends or a formal request made in the workplace or the classroom. When sending an email, remember to whom you are writing (a friend? an instructor? a social club? a prospective employer?) and adjust your word choice, grammar, and tone accordingly. Even in informal electronic communication, you should follow a process similar to the one in all of the genre sections of Part 5 of this textbook. Make yourself a checklist and think about the two main questions posed in each genre section: “What’s my rhetorical situation for these modes and media” (purpose, audience, and rhetorical appeals) and “What genre conventions matter?” (elements of the media, style, design, and sources).

Your communication is shaped as much by design, images, and nonverbal cues as by words. Your nonverbal behaviors influence your voice as well. For example, a short, two-word email might seem encouraging when you write it, but the message might feel abrupt to readers when they see it on the screen. Similarly, long sentences without punctuation to break up the cadence may visually reinforce to the audience that you are rambling. In electronic communication, we often use visual elements to stand in for oral or nonverbal cues. These elements help indicate the formality of your voice. A medium’s conventions help you establish meaning without written exposition. For example, ALL CAPS in an email or text usually signals shouting, which is useful occasionally but can offend an audience if used unintentionally or frequently.

You might also communicate nonverbally in your electronic communication through emoticons or emoji, which convey emotions that are hard to capture outside of a face-to-face setting (e.g., a winking face to indicate sarcasm). However, they are inappropriate in formal situations, so pay attention to your diction and perceived tone when you need to respond without these indicators. To ensure that your style or brevity is not misinterpreted, consider how others will perceive your text if they don’t have your particular background knowledge.

Emoticons and emoji are related; however, emoticons are represented with keyboard characters whereas emoji are small digital pictures. Both are popular ways of indicating tone and voice in electronic communication. Compare the Wikipedia definitions for emoticons and emoji. #Analyze

Social media posts and text messages are examples of media that often require an informal voice. However, when writing informally on social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, blogs), you should still be mindful of your voice. Texts and tweets, for example, are inherently quick and use limited characters but should still be thoughtfully composed, or you might confuse your recipient. In “short” messaging systems such as text messaging, chat programs, or Twitter, the conventions allow you to use abbreviations, unconventional grammar, and emoticons or emoji to more effectively convey your message within the character limits. To use these conventions successfully, you need to select them with your audience in mind. Would you use the same text message abbreviations with your grandparents, your parents, and your friends? If your recipient does not know what your abbreviations mean, can’t interpret your random characters as an identifiable emoticon, or considers your raised fist emoji as a sign of violence rather than a congratulatory fist bump, your communication is unsuccessful. While appropriate within social media, these tactics for conveying emotion would make readers question your ethos and professionalism in an academic venue.

Be careful not to transfer your “text speak” over into other venues (e.g., academic papers, scientific studies, business proposals, or résumés) where it might be inappropriate. If you are blogging, text messaging, or tweeting for a class assignment, check with your instructor about whether you are required to write in formal English or if less formal writing is acceptable. One important reminder about informal communication using electronic media: these messages can easily be taken out of context and become public on a global scale. As with all electronic communication, text messages (or Twitter posts, Facebook messages, and even Snapchats) you send are likely to be forwarded or copied without your permission. Do not send messages that you do not want everyone to see.

Cultural Factors & Writing Style

Language is a product of society and culture. The languages we speak and the cultures we grow up in influence not only the way we speak but also the way we write and communicate with each other. The view that the language we speak determines how we think is often called linguistic determinism, and the view that speakers of different languages think about the world in quite different ways is known as linguistic relativity.

The linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, in 1940, proposed a controversial theory that the language we speak influences the way we look at the world and process information. For example, he claimed that if a language does not have a future tense, the speakers of that language might not have any concept of future time. His theory, which later came to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (named after Whorf and his teacher Edward Sapir) has been criticized as being too simplistic. For example, if a language has no equivalent word for tomorrow, speakers of that language may still grasp the concept that another day follows the present one.

Referring to a discussion as an “inside joke” indicates the influence of culture, situation, and context on the language being used. Do you have any special words, phrases, or inside jokes that make sense only within your family? What cultural clues from your family group give this communication special meaning for you but not others? #Understand #Analyze

In recent years, however, the Sapir-Whorf theory has been revisited, and researchers have discovered that certain aspects of our thinking are influenced by the languages we speak. For example, some languages (like Spanish, French, and German) assign a gender to objects, unlike English, which is a gender-neutral language. An article from the New York Times describes how French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to a fork in a cartoon. French speakers, for whom “fork” (la fourchette) is feminine, gave it a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom “fork” (el tenedor) is masculine, gave the fork a male voice. The languages we speak and the cultures we grow up in do influence our ways of thinking and communicating. In written artifacts, you can see this connection between culture and language through assumptions about who is responsible for understanding the communication and through the tone considered appropriate for communication.

Writer-Responsible & Reader-Responsible Cultures ​Japanese discourse linguistics scholar John Hinds, in an influential 1987 article titled “Reader Responsibility versus Writer Responsibility: A New Typology,” put forth the argument that readers who belong to certain cultures have a greater responsibility to successfully comprehend a written communication. The article introduced the notion of reader responsibility, in contrast to writer responsibility.

For a verbal and visual discussion of cultural factors influencing language, search YouTube for <How they talk in KY, OH and TX (from AMERICAN TONGUES)>. This clip from the documentary American Tongues by Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker explains how culture and speech are interrelated, using many examples from linguistically diverse speakers.

According to Hinds, differences in rhetorical styles depend on culture and language background. In the United States, whether in the academy, community, or workplace, the communicator is responsible for effective written, oral, and visual communication. For example, the writer—not the reader—is responsible for establishing the intention, purpose, and coherence of a written document. More specifically, academic essays are expected to have a clear thesis or focus. The thesis indicates the purpose and direction of the essay and is usually stated in the first few paragraphs. The writer is expected to use topic sentences that focus the paragraphs, and the paragraphs are expected to support the thesis. A well-written essay is clear, focused, and makes strong points. No room exists for ambiguity. Connections between and among ideas are clearly drawn out, and readers are not expected to connect the dots. Consider the excerpt from a research argument by student Chase Dickinson, “Are Kids on a One-Way Path to Violence?” It presents a clear thesis in paragraph 3, which indicates the purpose and stance of the essay. Dickinson writes

While there are many who tend to think so , I believe that it is not the fault of the games themselves, but the lack of parental supervision and interaction with today’s youth. Also, preexisting mental disorders have been found to play a huge role in how different people will react to video games.

He makes his purpose and claims explicit for the reader from the beginning, and we expect he will follow through in the order he has established.

In some other cultures, however, readers are responsible for figuring out the purpose and focus of the written communication. For example, the following essay, written by a student from South Korea, has no clear thesis indicating the purpose of the essay. Readers will realize the main idea behind the essay only after reading the conclusion. The essay is compelling because of its indirect structure, but it would not be considered conventional in a U.S. academic context, even though it would be effective in the student’s home country. A U.S. reader expecting an academic essay might be confused by the indirect structure.

To make smart communication decisions, you need to be aware of the context of the communication. Remember to ask, “Who is the intended audience for the communication?” In the United States, which is a writer-responsible culture rather than a reader-responsible culture, you need to make sure that you clearly lay out the purpose and direction of the essay for readers. U.S. readers do not expect they will have to guess the author’s intention or purpose, so indirect approaches are often interpreted as ineffective writing.

Tone in Academic Language ​The rhetorical situation of communication helps you answer the question, “Is the tone I selected appropriate to the context, purpose, audience, and genre?” For example, your instructor might ask you to write a research essay about a certain topic. In this situation, your tone needs to be formal, with established claims, supporting evidence, and careful attention to writing in academic English (such as writing in full sentences, establishing topic sentences and paragraph transitions, and using collegiate-level vocabulary). In contrast, your instructor might ask you to write a blog post responding to a reading or an event. A blog post, according to convention, is less formal than a research essay and includes your opinion about the event or reading. See, for example, the blog post on the following page in response to a prompt about whether dying languages that are threatened with extinction should be saved.

Blog assignment prompt. The NY Times article “Listening to and Saving the World’s Languages” speaks about efforts to identify speakers of endangered languages and to preserve some of these languages. The questions prompted by the blog are as much philosophical as practical: Should endangered languages be saved? Why should we try to save a language that its speakers no longer find useful? Should languages be left to die a natural death, or should we do our utmost to save these languages? Should endangered languages be given the same attention that is given to the protection of endangered species of animals?

Blog Response to “Listening to and Saving the World’s Languages”
by Student Writer Rebecca Lally

Before reading this article, I was stuck in the mind-set that languages that are endangered should just die out, and no effort should be made to save them. I think things die out when they’re supposed to; the effort to keep them alive isn’t worth it.

After actually reading the article, however, my opinion changed. A language can really define people and their background, and knowing and enjoying your background is accompanied by a sense of comfort and a better understanding of who you are. A lot of effort is required to keep these languages alive, and they are bound to die out eventually, but the people are happier if they can use a language in their lifetime and if they feel as if they prolonged its life just a little bit longer. A big difference exists in trying to preserve your mother tongue in your native country and trying to preserve it here in America. Kids of my generation have to know English to grow up in America and survive. They probably don’t see the point in learning their parents’ mother tongue, and if they do learn it, they do not use it outside of the home. I think languages like that are bound to die here in America. Even with more popular ones like Spanish, if the Spanish-speaking children marry English-speaking Americans, they will spend the majority of their lives speaking English when outside of the home. English is used across the US, so preserving languages like Garifuna or Neo-Aramaic is difficult.

I think no matter how large of an effort is given, these languages will soon enough serve little to no purpose. They will only be spoken in the small communities that use them, but outside of the home and small communities, they will not be effective. I think the approach that Mr. Lovell was taking is a good approach. It teaches the children their heritage and what the words mean, but he doesn’t expect them to speak it all day every day. That is a good balance. Language should be preserved in order to teach people their heritage and culture, but they shouldn’t have to be fluent in it.

Lally’s response contains her personal opinion about endangered languages and the efforts made to save them. Her tone is less formal in this blog post than her tone would be in a formal essay, but she is still following writing conventions because of her audience and purpose.

Languages & Dialects

What is the difference between a language and a dialect? Unfortunately, the response to this question is not as clear as one might expect. Very often, political and social rather than linguistic criteria determine whether or not a language is a dialect.

How can we distinguish a situation of several separate languages from a situation with several dialects of the same language? One of the linguistic tests to determine whether two people are speaking separate languages or whether those two people are using dialects of each other’s language is mutual intelligibility. Two languages or dialects are mutually intelligible if one can be understood by speakers of the other and vice versa. For example, speakers of Scandinavian languages like Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish can understand each other because they speak similar languages:

Danish:               Hun sidder i vinduet og ser ud over gaden.

Norwegian:       Hun sitter i vinduet og ser ut over gatan.

Swedish:             Hon sitter i fönstret och ser ut över gatan.

English:              She is sitting at the window and is looking out over the street.

In the case of Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, the three languages are mutually intelligible, so linguistically speaking, these languages could be considered dialects of each other, rather than separate languages. However, these languages are spoken by people who live in different countries who want to have separate linguistic identities. Hence, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are politically and socially identified as separate languages that are spoken by people in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

On the other hand, in China, Mandarin and Cantonese are looked upon as Chinese dialects, even though these two languages are not mutually intelligible. Mandarin and Cantonese are, in reality, two separate languages rather than dialects of each other. Thus, in practice, a language can be called a dialect, and a dialect can be called a language for social and political reasons.

Three elements distinguish languages from one another:

1. Lexicon: The thing a chicken lays is “egg” in English, oeuf in French, and huevo in Spanish.
2. Syntax: English has subject-verb-object word order. For example: Jill kicked the ball. Japanese has subject-object-verb word order. For example: Jiru wa, boru o ketta (Jill ball kicked).
3. Morphology: English has a plural morpheme s, which is added to transform a word from singular to plural. For example, one ball becomes several balls. Chinese, however, does not have such a way of marking plurals.

Four elements distinguish dialects from other dialects:

1. Lexicon: Knock up means “wake up” in British English but “make pregnant” in American English.
2. Syntax: Some southern American dialects have the construction “I might could come for the movie tonight” where two auxiliaries might and could are combined within the same sentence. Similarly, in many Midwestern American dialects, speakers perfectly normally say, “The crops need watered,” a phrase that may be frowned upon in certain academic settings.
3. Morphology: The reflexive pronouns hisself and theirselves are used in some American and British dialects of English, while the more standard forms, himself and themselves, are used in others.
4. Phonetics: The r sound is trilled in some British and Scottish dialects of English, but not in most American dialects.

What Are Dialects of English & Why Do They Exist? Is the sweet fizzy drink called soda, pop, or coke? Well, the answer depends on where in the United States you ask this question. Various dialects of English are spoken all over the world. British English is spoken in the United Kingdom, Indian English is spoken in India, and American English is spoken in the United States. The dialect you see and hear on television and radio in North America is largely Standard American English (SAE). However, many different dialects of American English are spoken across the country. If you move from one region of the United States to another, you might find you comprehend the individual words people say, but the accent, dialect, emphasis, and idiomatic expressions may be hard for you to follow. The southern dialect of English spoken in the United States, for example, is distinctive. For a humorous look at southern English in comparison to Standard American English, watch Lemonette’s YouTube video “On Being Bilingual.” Do you recognize any of the markers of southern English from living in Georgia?

Dialects are created by differences in geographical location, differences in customs and traditions, and other factors such as age, gender, and context. Young people tend to speak differently than older people. The word like, for example, is used far more frequently by young people in various grammatical contexts than by older people.

Similarly, gender plays a role in determining the dialect of a language one speaks. In some languages, like Japanese, for example, women may choose to speak a distinct female dialect. Japanese has many honorific words (words that convey politeness and signal social status); women tend to use polite forms more often than men. Women also use formal speech (formal verbal inflections) more often than men.

Dialects & Prejudice Linguistically speaking, no one dialect or language is better than another. All languages and dialects are rule-governed, rational, human creations. However, over time, certain dialects have assumed greater or lesser social prestige than others. Unfortunately, dialects are very often used as a basis of discrimination. People who speak a socially nonprestigious dialect could find themselves discriminated against in certain contexts. For example, John Baugh, the linguist who coined the term linguistic profiling, found that people who spoke certain dialects of English were discriminated against when they were looking for places to live. Equally interesting, William Labov’s influential 1972 study of class-based dialects in New York revealed that people react differently to different dialects and that certain dialects are associated with higher prestige than others.

Learn more about Baugh’s study from Patricia Rice’s article “Linguistic Profiling: The Sound of Your Voice May Determine If You Get That Apartment or Not” on the Washington University in St. Louis Web site. Find out more about Labov’s study in his book The Social Stratification of English in New York City (2006).

Some dialects are often made fun of on television, and the speakers of those dialects are perceived as being lazy and stupid. One dialect that is frequently the subject of jokes is the southern dialect of American English. For example, The Daily Show’s former host, Jon Stewart, made fun of Texas governor Rick Perry’s southern dialect. You can view this clip by searching for “Indecision 2012—The Great Right Hope.” Whether these dialects are labeled nonprestigious or prestigious is not clear-cut. For example, African American English (AAE), a dialect of American English spoken, with several variations, by some African Americans in the United States, is in certain contexts a nonprestigious dialect and in certain other contexts a preferred dialect.

Which dialects are preferred in the academic environment? #Apply

Translating between Languages ​Translation (or lack of translation) can be a serious issue that influences access to medical care and education, among other important services. Imagine seeking medical care for yourself or a family member in a country where you have only a basic understanding of the language. How would you be able to understand the ramifications of particular procedures?

Watch the YouTube video “ASL—Your Right to an Interpreter (with Captions)” about the rights of hearing impaired people. Construct a position statement about what qualities must be considered for fair and equitable communication. #Create

When you translate written language, you must be careful to capture not just the literal meaning of the words but also the context, connotations, and intent associated with them. One particularly dramatic example deals with the challenges of translating an experimental novel written as a lipogram, a type of writing that purposefully and systematically omits a particular letter. In Georges Perec’s French novel La Disparition, the letter e—the most frequent letter in both French and English—never appears (except in the author’s name). The novel was translated by Gilbert Adair into English as A Void. To maintain fidelity with the experimental constraints of the original, Adair had to translate the text carefully to not reintroduce the letter e. Thus translation becomes far more challenging than just selecting the right word to convey the intention; the translation must also attend to the constraint the author imposed on himself. A literal translation of Perec’s novel might be readable, but it would be devoid of its artistic inspiration and of the original intention and meaning.

Read Miguel Helft’s 2010 New York Times article “Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation Tool” to see how Brin is pushing to improve Google Translate because the task is so challenging.
#Understand

More and more multilingual writers now use online translators such as the popular Google Translate to translate between English and other languages, as least as a place to start. However, you can see that an online translator would be inadequate in a task such as translating La Disparition. While online translators can sometimes be useful tools in translating between languages, keep in mind that different languages assign different meanings to the same concept. Online translators are good at providing a literal translation of text from one language to another. However, a literal translation might give results such as the one Google founder Sergey Brin obtained in 2004 using Google Translate for a message in Korean saying that Google was a favorite search engine. The result read: “The sliced raw fish shoes it wishes. Google green onion thing!” The capabilities have since improved, but they’re still not as good as using an expert, bilingual human.

Relying on an online program to translate your writing is not a very good choice for multilingual writers. The best translator, even as online translators get more sophisticated, is still a human. A good strategy would be to write in English by looking up words using an online translator; then make sure a friend who is a native speaker reviews your text before you submit it.

Assumptions about Gender ​English is one of the few Western languages that do not assign gender to nouns and pronouns. For example, in French using the pronoun he is correct when referring to the indefinite pronoun someone.

French:                           Si quelqu’un veut de la pizza, il doit chercher une assiette.

English translation:       If someone wants pizza, he should get a plate.

In this example, the word quelqu’un translates into English as someone and the word il translates as he. In French, this pronoun use would be appropriate in all contexts even if the someone were female. In Standard American English, a person might more appropriately say, “If someone wants pizza, he or she should get a plate” or “If someone wants pizza, a plate is required” or “Eating pizza usually requires a plate.” Follow this simple guideline: avoid using he in English when the gender of a person is unknown or if you’re making a generalization about people rather than a generalization about males.

The pronoun one. How can you use the gender-neutral pronoun one? While the use of one is commonplace in British English, some in the United States believe the usage is stilted. Using one can also distance speakers or writers from the audience, which may reduce the effectiveness of the communication. If you are speaking or writing informally, you can replace one with you. For example, in an email, a blog post, a TED talk, or a podcast, you could say, “You really have to be careful when walking alone at night on campus” instead of “One really has to be careful when walking alone at night on campus.”

He or she. You can use he or she to refer to a gender-neutral noun such as lawyer: “A lawyer must pass the bar exam before he or she can begin to practice.” Reserve such use for formal writing, such as in an academic paper; in informal writing or oral presentations, the usage can appear awkward. If possible without altering the sentence’s meaning, revise it to make the pronoun plural and increase concision: “Lawyers must pass the bar exam before they can begin to practice.”

He, she, or they? After reading the preceding sections, you may be surprised when you read a news article in which the author refers to he or she when talking about someone of unknown gender. For example, you may read something like “When a child grows older, she needs more guidance from her parents” or “When a student fails a test, ask him to retake it.” Another confusing example might be “When a patient needs more medicine, they should get it.” Why do these examples appear? No authoritative consensus yet exists on which pronoun should replace a singular, gender-neutral noun like child. Using they for the unknown he or she as in the child or the student is becoming common, but violates the conventions of Standard American English. The word they is a third-person plural pronoun and cannot replace a singular noun like child if you are following formal grammatical rules. You should avoid using he, she, or they to replace a singular gender-neutral noun. You could sometimes repeat the noun: “When a student fails a test, ask the student to retake it.”

Watch “What if? Georgia Tech” on YouTube. Assess the creators’ choice to speak out against sexual violence using only male speakers, especially given Georgia Tech’s demographics. Also, how does the video suggest our language is part of the problem that must be addressed? #Understand #Evaluate

Political Correctness ​Political correctness is a common concept in the United States. The term’s usage and definition have been widely debated by political, ethnic, social, and intellectual groups. Political correctness is influenced by a range of factors. What counts? Demographic factors such as gender, age, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation matter. Geography and culture matter. Personal choice matters, including occupation as well as religious and political beliefs. And physical characteristics matter, including body type and disabilities. One goal of political correctness is to avoid insulting or offending people. Another goal is to identify yourself as a person who is aware that careless use of language can hurt or insult. Some people believe that political correctness denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior that seek to minimize the use of terms to describe people who might cause offense. Others argue that political correctness provides inclusive language to talk about the diversity of people who live in the United States. For example, the term African American is the preferred term of many people who, decades ago, used to be called Negro or colored. Many consider African American or black to be a politically correct terms while considering Negro and colored politically incorrect. Patricia Aufderheide’s Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding (1992) gives an interesting account of this phenomenon in the chapter entitled “A Short History of the Term ‘Politically Correct.’”

Despite the ongoing debate about political correctness, many international students find that, on a daily basis, people in the United States use more terms for the nation’s diverse population than in their home countries, where political correctness may be reserved for government officials. Richard Yam, international student adviser at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in his editorial “Cultural Adjustment and Transitioning,” writes that Americans’ “openness and political correctness can be overwhelming” to international students.

According to Georgia Tech’s Office of Institute Diversity, the Institute has a nonwhite population of 49 percent, which makes it one of the most diverse universities in the world. The Institute has a mission to support diversity:

We realize that, in order to achieve our vision for Georgia Tech as a leader in influencing the major technological, social, and policy decisions in the 21st century, we must recruit and retain faculty, staff, and students from a wide array of backgrounds, perspectives, interests, and talents. In doing so, we will create a community that exemplifies the best in all of us—our intellectual pursuits, our diversity of thought, and our personal integrity. Our mission to achieve inclusive excellence means unleashing the full potential of Tech’s human capacity to create a better, sustainable future for us all.

Georgia Tech’s Office of Institute Diversity provides guidelines about approaching diversity when trying to become an effective writer or communicator in the United States. Consider the following tips about ways to address a diverse audience (adapted from those provided by our Office of Institute Diversity):

Adapt to your audience

• Know your audience (age, race, ethnicity, ability/disability). Consider questions such as these: Do you need an interpreter? Are there people in your audience with visual impairment? Does hand and finger dexterity of the audience permit the use of a personal recording system (PRS)? Do you have people who are color-blind?
• Consider your audience’s prior and common knowledge.

Adjust your dialect and diction

• Avoid slang, jargon, and acronyms.
• Avoid using or referring to culturally specific language, examples, customs, and so on.
• Rectify any language patterns or case examples that exclude or demean any group.
• Do your best to be sensitive to terminology that refers to specific ethnic or cultural groups.
• Use inclusive language.
• Try to express your own displeasure without spicing up your language with exaggerations or inflammatory words.

Respect your audience’s values

• Be culturally sensitive and culturally appropriate.
• Recognize that your worldview is typical of that of your country (or even state) of origin. People from different countries may not share the same worldview. For example, people in the United States often value youth over age, but this attitude may not be the same in Asian countries.
• Examine and recognize your own attitudes, beliefs, biases, and stereotypes.
• Seek information about the history and culture of groups other than your own.
• Do not assume the audience will recognize cultural, literary, or historical references familiar to you.

Do an Internet search for <Beloit mindset list> and select the year you entered college. Compare and contrast your class with a much earlier one. How do they differ? What difference might those discrepancies make when communicating with that group? #Apply

Use appropriate oral language and actions

• Make sure the rate of your speech is not too fast.
• Speak clearly and use proper enunciation.
• Make sure the audience seems engaged and they are following you with appropriate nonverbal feedback.
• Demonstrate sincere interest through tone and body language.
• Know that listening is not agreement.

Use humor appropriately

• Use humor with caution. Humor is relative.

Use visuals thoughtfully

• Use visual aids for clarity.
• Be aware of cultural differences in the meaning of images, design, and color.

Think about your own culture of origin (whether from another part of the United States or another country entirely). What are stereotypes some people believe about this culture? #Understand #Apply

The Office of Institute Diversity also provides the following list of ways students may differ from one another. Consider these factors carefully before you create artifacts for your classmates:

• Race
• Ethnicity
• Gender, gender identity, or gender expression
• Socioeconomic group
• Family situation (e.g., two-parent household, marital status, children)
• Disability/ability
• Learning style
• Political affiliation
• Age
• Sex
• Sexual orientation
• Geographic location
• Major
• Country of origin
• Travel experiences