Codes in Composition: Crossing Community Boundaries

Abstract

There are a number of ways to account for the style of this short passage. It comes out of a first-year student’s profile essay, the second essay he has written in this class. His purpose is to offer a descriptive portrait of his family’s life in a small Central European town. One way to characterize his prose would be to a bit like Hemingway’s: simple, direct, and brief. Another description would suggest that the writer lacks the syntactic repertoire to create variety and interest. A better answer would suggest that this writer comes from a community that ascribes value to shared information and predictable sentence forms. In my developmental writing classes I encounter this style with some frequency. For years I chalked this style up to the habits of “underpracticed” writers. My preference for more elaborate and even ornate prose had manifested itself as a form of bias in favor of academic expression. For all those years I had misinterpreted the source of this style.

When I come there with my family everybody we see we kiss them on both cheeks, even though I don’t know half of these people. That’s how people greet in Europe and here I am kissing a dude’s cheek as scruffy as I am. Everybody is happy to see us and we all sit in the private table in the back. Chicko is my dad’s brother, he lives in Ulcinj and he runs the town basically. He’s done a lot of work with the mafia and still till this day he does some kind of work with them. He never talks about it though, I believe he’s keeping us unknown about it.

—A young American writer reflecting on Montenegro.