My Critique on Vershawn Ashanti Young's essay, "Should Writers Use They Own English"

For a class assignment, I read Vershawn Ashanti Young’s essay “Should Writers Use They Own English.” It was interesting to read Young’s as he discussed about the perspectives on what is considered “standard” english in comparison to what most people perceived as a “variation” of the english language. This essay made some good points on the “so-called varieties 'of English or dialect in relation to standard English, we're not dealin with two different languages; we're dealing with a common language.” That quote made sense on the concept of a common language as what is considered to be “standard” or “variation” of english does not make them separate languages. While Young made a good argument for the concept of a common language but his recommendation for a teaching style that supports this concept seems to be too much for a regular teacher to handle. As stated in Young’s essay, “I say we teach language descriptively. This mean we should, for instance, teach how language functions within and from various cultural perspectives. And we should teach what it take to understand, listen, and write in multiple dialects simultaneously.” The style of teaching that Young proposes would take too much time and effort to make it work effectively since there is simply too much to learn or understand about these “variations” of the english language while also having no guarantee that anyone would retain this information.

Then there is the type of english language that he uses in this essay. As shown in this quote, “Students be told that vernacular language should be reserved for the playground with friends or at a picnic with neighbors, and that standard English be used by professionals at work, in academic writing, and when communicating with important officials.” In that quote, Young has some obvious grammar differences in comparison to “standard” english as he uses phrase like “be told” to mean a phrase like “as told” or shown in the previous quotes that I used where he used the word “dealin” to mean “dealing.” To be honest, the reason I understood most of what Young was saying in this essay is due to my own knowledge in “standard” english as he used words or phrases that, if sounded out, resembles a lot of words and phrases I learned through “standard” english. While Young does make some good points in his essay, I don’t entirely agree with him when he says that people should be taught to understand all forms of the english language because using the “standard” version of the english language in a professional setting makes as much sense to me as wearing “business” clothing in a professional environment.

The point that I am trying to make is that it all comes down to preferences when deciding to use a “variation” of the english language or the “standard” english language as people have a choice to approach any sort of situation, in the verbal sense, with what they believe to be a reasonable solution, in other words the type of language they choose to use.