Shifting Styles II
Shifting Styles II
WHAT IS SHIFTING STYLES?
One of the fundamental purposes of human language is the communication of a message from one human to another. There are many different ways of communicating with someone else, especially in the current technologically advanced day that we live in: from researched essays to fictional short stories to emails and Facebook posts. Composition scholars often refer to these ways of communicating as modes (similar to a mode of transportation. Not all of these different ways of communicating a message, or modes, would have the same effect though. For example, we have handwritten letters and we have text messages. While both of these modes of communication have the ability to communicate a message, the choice of which mode might vary depending on a variety of factors like: who you are trying to communicate with, what message you are trying to get across, and many other factors. Let's say that you are trying to tell your girlfriend how much she means to you. You could do this with a text message: 'hey babe you mean the world 2 me.' But sending a two-page letter using your own handwriting might give a more personal touch that could really convince her of your undying affection. There is nothing to stop you from communicating the same message in either mode, but if your purpose were to signal true personal attention, then the mode of a handwritten letter would have been a better choice.
WHY SHIFT STYLES?
While the purpose of what/why you are trying to communicate can have an important impact on your choice of mode, the audience you are trying to communicate with can have just as much if not more of an impact on how you choose to communicate. For example, let's say you are trying to communicate the message of what happened at work today, but you are writing to two different audiences, your boss and your best friend. Perhaps it would make the most sense to write your boss an email, while it might be more effective to write a text message to your best friend. There is a strong and interconnected relationship between the mode, audience, and the purpose when communicating.
HOW DO I SHIFT STYLES?
Now, let's take this a bit deeper and see if there are any other factors that might be influencing how you communicate with someone else. Let's go back to our example of trying to communicate what happened at work today with both our boss and our best friend, but this time, let's use the same mode, an email. So, does this mean that our email will look exactly the same whether we are writing to our boss or our best friend? No. You are probably thinking that there would be a difference in what you choose to put in the email based on the audience. If you are writing to your boss, you probably are going to tell her the things that she wants to know about, things like how much you got done, how much progress you made on the account, how quickly you think you will have that report ready, etc. But in your email to your friend, she probably cares less about those things, or at least she would want to know different aspects about them. Your friend would probably be more interested in that funny thing that happened at lunch when that awkward guy Roger tried to give his number to Sue and she straight up rejected him, for the third time this week.
So, at least one difference between the emails with the two audiences is in the content of the email. But would there be any other differences? You might be thinking that maybe not just the content but even the way the email is written would be different. In the email to your boss you would probably be using full sentences, maybe even paragraphs. You would probably be using more formal ways of writing and making sure to spell check everything, and you might even be thinking about some of those comma rules for joining two sentences together into one. Now with the best friend, you're probably thinking that things would be different. You wouldn't be caring as much about things like spelling and comma placement, and you certainly aren't going to be writing formally.
DIFFERENT COMMUNICATION SITUATIONS AND DIFFERENT AUDIENCES HAVE DIFFERENT DESIRES AND EXPECTATIONS.
Now, take a second and think about the differences here. If you wrote to your boss in the informal way you wrote to your friend, the boss would probably think something was weird, but in the same way, if you wrote to your friend in the formal way that you wrote to your boss, the friend would also think something was weird. So, this illustrates that not only the content of the message but also the way that you write it (the word choices, sentence structures, and even punctuation) has an important and powerful impact on the success of your message being received by your intended audience. What's going on here? Why is it that you can't just use the same way of communicating with every audience? It's because different communication situations and different audiences have different desires and expectations about how they like to be communicated with in a given situation. If you don't meet these expectations, your message won't be communicated the best way it possibly could.
This also happens when we speak, although you may have never stopped to think about it. When you go in to give a report to your boss, a lot of things might change in how you are speaking compared to hanging out with your friend later after work. There will be a difference between your word choice, the types of sentences you use, how authoritative a tone you take, your use of honorifics (words and sentence structures expressing status, politeness, and/or respect), and even the amount of accent present in your pronunciation. When we are in a high status stressful speech situation, like giving a report to our boss, we tend to have less regional accent present in our pronunciations, word choice, and sentence structures while we may make greater use of honorifics to signify that we respect the difference in social position between our self (an entry level number cruncher) and our boss.
Now, you shouldn't take this example of a high status speech situation as the default way to speak. For example, when we meet up with our friend later for dinner and start recounting the daily drama between Roger and Sue in the breakroom, we aren't still going to be talking like we were with our boss. No, now our vowels are sounding like we grew up in Hemingway, SC, we're using a more relaxed vocabulary and sentence structure, and since we are talking to our best friend our use of honorifics has changed to signal that we are of equal status in the relationship.
These changes, which we looked at in the Shifting Styles Badge in English 101, are fundamental and deep, but they take place naturally, multiple times on a daily basis and are often below the level of conscious awareness. Linguists call this kind of change between multiple ways of speaking code switching. Listen to yourself when you are away from home and you get a call from someone back in your hometown in New Jersey. You are probably going to be talking on the phone a lot more like people do back in Jersey than what you are talking like when you speak to your college roommate who's from Hemingway, SC.
NONE OF THESE WAYS OF COMMUNICATING IS BETTER; THEY ARE JUST DIFFERENT.
You see, one speaker has a variety of different ways of communicating available to them. None of these ways of communicating is better; they are just different. What determines which is the best way of communicating has nothing to do with "rules" taught to you from some self-proclaimed, all-knowing automaton (like Mr. Crabtree, your fourth grade grammar-obsessed English Teacher). Rather, what matters most is who you are talking to and, given the speech and social situation, what that audience's expectations are. Going back to our previous examples of written communication, it would be perceived as wrong to use formal language with your friend since she would be expecting you to be more informal given your relationship and the content of the email. It would be equally wrong for you to use informal language with your boss in the email since given your relationship and the content of the email she would be expecting a certain amount of formality. Thus, the audience is what determines the language that we use and how we go about communicating.
WHAT DOES SHIFTING STYLES LOOK LIKE?
Now, what about times when the style of language shifts from what the audience expects in a given situation? Read the following example from Geneva Smitherman, a retired distinguished professor at Michigan State University who specializes in sociolinguistics and African American English. She is writing in a peer-reviewed, academic journal, The English Journal, to an audience of English professors and compositionists about the achievement gap between Caucasian students and students of color.
It is now a cliché to speak of the identity crisis of contemporary Americans, yet for Black youth particularly, the crisis is very real since in many significant dimensions, Black culture is diametrically opposed to white middle class culture. Witness, for example, the ghetto culture's hairstyles, mannerisms, patterns of dress, dance, etc. (many of which, of course, have been adopted by white youth as a mark of rebellion). On a larger scale, note the conflict between value systems wherein the ghetto's pimps, hustlers, and sundry other brothers into an "illegit" thang are idealized and respected. The Black youth must decide is he gon square up and join the mainstream or get super-hip and remain in the street thang? (62)
The audience here of English professors and the writing situation of an academic journal would usually call for highly formal language with a lack of regional variation in word choice and sentence structure. This is the variety of language that some may call standardized English or what sociolinguists like Smitherman would call the Language of Wider Communication. While most of the article and most of this excerpt are written in this formalized Language of Wider Communication, at several places throughout the article, Smitherman code switches into the language patterns of African American English, for example "he gon square up and join the mainstream or get super-hip and remain in the street thang." Now, what would the audience think here? Smitherman is obviously aware that her audience would expect this academic article to be written in the Language of Wider Communication and she does partially do this, but then why are there several places, almost in every paragraph, where Smitherman code switches into something not expected? What is the effect, what is the purpose?
Well, one possibility is that since this is something unexpected, the audience perks up. What they were expecting to hear suddenly changed, and it is clearly intention of the author to do this. So, a sudden change can be used for emphatic reasons. As we see in this case, not only does our knowledge of the audience's expectations help dictate what linguistic style would be best to communicate to them in, if this style is suddenly changed, then the effect can be a powerful way to emphasize a point and make the audience pay extra attention.
Works Cited
Smitherman, Geneva. 1972. "English Teacher, Why You Be Doing the Thangs You Don't Do?" The English Journal 61.1 (1972): 59-65. Print.
For citation, use:
Coastal Carolina University, Department of English, First-Year Writing Program. "Shifting Styles II." Coastal Composition Commons, 24 August 2017, https://ccc.coastal.edu/task/102-badge-4/. Accessed xx xxxxxx xxxx.