Elegance in Technical Communications

For a technical writer or editor, elegance is inextricably linked with clarity in written communications. Elegance incorporates both content and style. An elegant communications piece both informs and maintains a reader's attention through its attention to sentence balance, coordination, and word choice. In certain situations, an elegant piece will be rhetorically sophisticated, with nominalizations providing ballast. In other situations, an elegant piece will be technologically sophisticated, with hypertextual opportunities to extend a conversation. Most importantly a sense of purpose, audience and content will govern the approach taken in choosing a stylized, or elegant, approach to writing.

Style and Language Evolution

Gina Fish

ENG 5365

February 9, 2010

Dr. Rich Rice



Style and Language Evolution

Technology has made writers of us all. At my first job in magazine publishing in the 1970s, 10 poker-faced copy editors and 20 skilled secretaries hammered out the errors from everyone’s bad prose. These ancient editors ruled using arcane rules from style manuals that never changed. A young editorial assistant took at least a decade to apprentice onto the copy desk. Suddenly, into the newsroom came the industry’s first publishing software: ATEX. Life in the newsroom changed forever as we traded in our Selectrics for computers. Technology shaped our editing and writing immeasurably.

Fast forward several decades into the internet age. Copy editors seem to have disappeared, and few secretaries are around to massage executive communication. Workplaces have evolved, and there are fewer layers of review involved as hierarchies flatten. From the number of errors that appear in metropolitan dailies or in the Wall Street Journal, we can deduce that writers input stories directly into publications without editing. Bloggers scoop news outlets to attract followers who admire their content, style, and currency. A premium is placed on writing gracefully and clearly. Writers use style rules that suit them, and they ignore rules that don’t. With crowd sourcing freed from stilted and arcane rules in an interconnected world, the English language changes at an accelerated rate.

Communicators who adapt to a hypertextual world are prospering as they learn how to appeal to audiences stylistically. Writing clearly and gracefully has traditionally come to those who grew up reading good books. Unfortunately, however, many of our tech-savvy children rarely read, and therefore a significant group come to college and struggle with writing. These students present a challenge to instructors who are astounded at their lack of knowledge of their own language. It is difficult to describe the grace of elegant prose to those who don’t read; it is even more difficult to prescribe grammar rules to those who have rarely heard clear speech. Literacy segregates our society. Teaching the fundamentals of style takes on a new urgency to prepare members of our society for technological forms that are still developing. Clarity and cohesion are more important than ever.

As Richard Lanham notes, style is not peripheral, but rather “choreographs the whole dance of human consciousness, a dance in which practical purpose and information play but one role” (2003, p.8). Seen in this light, we recognize our English language as organic beauty rather than historic artifact. We know that styles that developed over time will continue to change as language evolves in a changing society. While the impact of technology upon style has been widely documented, less attention has been paid to an equally important demographic shift that will alter our language in ways yet unknown.

A fisheye-lens view of the English language in America would capture divergent Indian Asian diction among our programmers, black vernacular dialect in our hip-hop, and Latinate forms sparring with satisfying Anglo-Saxon words everywhere else. Our language at any given time reflects where we came from long ago and who joined us recently. The widely documented changes in publishing technology may not change our language as much as the immense demographic shift America is now experiencing. While we are dazzled with technology, we must also examine social change. We cannot overlook a group whose impact will contribute to the next great change in the style of our language.

A number of states, including my own state of Florida, are experiencing surges in the growth of the Latina/o population. In a recent five-year period, we had a 36% increase in our Latin/o population (New Strategist, 2007). As most composition instructors do not share the culture of students from Mexico, Honduras, Peru or Cuba (merely 4.5% of us are Latina/o (New Strategist, 2007)), we are already experiencing in our classrooms the impact of this demographic shift, and we are a bit bewildered about how to integrate biculturalism into our composition programs. By the year 2015, Latinas/os will make up the majority school-age population in several states (Durran and Weffer, 1992). Some college composition classes in my state already are being taught in two languages with students taught to brainstorm in Spanish and write in English.

Many of these students immigrated as adults. The work of adults who think in Spanish and write in English will inevitably echo their native tongue. With enormous demographic changes, writing as “a social practice” Correa (2008, p. 1), will change stylistically. Most notably, immigrants and native-born second-language writers from Latin American countries will contribute to evolution in vocabulary and sentence structure just as ancient conquerors changed our language.

Few of “us” are knowledgeable about the ways in which Latinas/os think or write. As the population continues to grow and Latinas/os enter our colleges in increasing numbers, our vocabulary will be enriched by additional choices. Think, for instance, about the words that have made their way into our language to express concepts we hadn’t thought about: mestizo, taquito, machismo and albino. Webster’s suggests that we had no idea what to call an alligator in Florida until a Spaniard named it “el lagarto.”

Latinas/os while writing in Spanish use different rhetorical approaches and revision strategies (Eaton, Brewer, Portewig & Davidson, 2008). Spanish has different grammar rules that can carry over into English for a second language writer. English continuous tense patterns are very different (Espinoza, 1997). English paragraphs contain topical coherence while Spanish paragraphs do not (Simpson, 2000). Even seemingly simple things like comma usage are different in the two tongues. A college-educated Peruvian in my English Language Learner (ELL) class last week was pondering my lesson about using commas when joining two independent clauses with the word “and.” “We don’t ever do that in Spanish,” he noted. “We learn as children that ‘y’ is too short to put a comma before.” I suddenly recognized why none of my Latina/o composition students seem to “get” that rule. I asked Antonio Elias if he ever did his thinking in English. No, he always thinks in Spanish; all of his classmates concurred.

Consider the impact of these factors: a huge proportion of our adult population is thinking in Spanish before writing in English, one out of 10 Mexicans actually lives in the U.S. (Hellman, 2007), and some of our schools are becoming majority Latina/o. It is clear that the style of our written language is destined to evolve.

Our language will change so long as we don’t cleave the immigrant population into a permanent segregated underclass based on linguistics. It is unlikely that our democracy will put up with segregation over the long run for a group that is esteemed for being such hard workers. It is more likely that our language will slowly be transformed; prose styles may be more relaxed with looser topical structures. Scholars have noted that Latin cultures use emotional appeals and feelings as a form of persuasion (Eaton et al, 2008). Some of this rhetoric will rub off on us. After all, it has been noted that none of us think or write completely outside of the culture in which we live. (Crowley & Hawhee, 2004). That culture is changing. I’ve already changed kairotically as I interact with these students in ELL class. My view of time has shifted: at the designated starting time for each class, I look out at a completely empty classroom. This used to bother me, but now I simply begin prepping my lesson. Students straggle in one at a time as life allows, sharing stories, problems, and successes. Some of our best learning occurs during these one-on-one conversations rather than during the grammar lessons. In teaching Latinas/os the style of the English language, it appears in some important ways that I’ve been the one whose style has evolved.

When we focus rightfully on the impact of technology upon style, we recognize that technology has made writing ascend in importance in our lives. While technology’s dramatic influence captures our attention, it is equally important to pay attention to demographic shifts in America. These changes will have a profound stylistic impact in ways yet unknown if we show second-language students how to participate in the conversation and share the technology. States like Florida are in the vanguard; Cubano politics and biculturalism change our classrooms, conversations, and physical environment. Inevitably, language in a vibrant democracy will embrace the emotionalism and style of another Latin diaspora.













 

References

Correa, D. M. (2008, February). Understanding voice in the disciplines: The struggles of Latina non-traditional students and their instructors (Dissertation). University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Duran, B. J., & Weffer, R. E. (1992). Immigrants' aspiration, high school process, and academic outcomes. American Educational Research Journal, 29(1), 163-181. doi: 10.3102/00028312029001163

Eaton, A., Brewer, P., Portewig, T. & Davidson, C. (2008, May). Comparing cultural perceptions of editing from the author’s point of view. Technical Communication 55(2). 140-141.

Espinoza, A.M. (1997), Contrastive analysis of the Spanish and English passive voice in scientific prose. English for Specific Purposes 16(3). 229-243 doi:10.1016/S0889-4906(96)00034-8



Lanham, R. (2003). Analyzing Prose. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons.



Hellman, J. (2007). The world of Mexican migrants: The rock and the hard place. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.

New Strategist Editors. (2007). Who we are: Hispanics. Ithaca, NY: New Strategist Publications.

Simpson, J. (2000, September) Abstract. Journal of Second Language Writing, 9(3), 293-309.