Studio || Dismantling "Standard English"

Writing is like water.  It be as placid and calm as still, pre-dawn lake or as raging as a roiling ocean.  It can be hard enough to stand on and gentle enough to bring life to a new sapling.  It can give life.  It is needed.  It is malleable and flexible and all around us and a source of great power and great mystery.  Indeed; if writing is all of these things, then why do writers, academics, teachers, researchers and so many others continue to force writing to be only one thing?  To me, this seems like looking at water and saying it can only exist in a plastic bottle; shaped and shipped and packaged and produced to serve one singular goal.  Water is not that.  And neither is writing.

Music: "The Rain Just Started Falling" by Tyler Lyle

Transcript of this Episode 

‘Thinking while black’—Read Grace A Musila’s essay from the award-winning book Black Academic Voices: The South African Experience

Why it’s time to stop worrying about the decline of the English language

It's time to challenge the notion that there is only one way to speak English