Cultural Writing Skills

One thing we do in our Leading Young Writers workshops is to differentiate speech and writing, as this teacher is doing here. It's a vital distinction for all teachers to make as they prepare to facilitate writing clubs, and it emphasizes why it is worrisome that students do so little writing (as opposed to copying) in schools in Sierra Leone.

We should make another important distinction in the Leading Young Writers workshops--a cultural one. West African cultures are listener-responsible, and Western/first-world cultures are speaker-responsible[1]. Since interactions between the two began, this difference has caused misunderstandings between them. It is common for members of both cultural groups to form judgments and prejudices about the other as a result of this difference. The point where it becomes tragic is when one with such misconceptions has the means and will to publicize them as if they were fact, or has the power to take decisions about a person in the other cultural group that will affect his/her livelihood.

The native English-speaking world's nature as a speaker-responsible society is one of the factors that drives ESL process-writing workshops in Sierra Leone. It is true that the target spoken English in schools in Sierra Leone is in most cases, that spoken by educated Sierra Leoneans. However, the target written English is standard English. The final draft in our Young Writers workshops should be clear and in most cases, unambiguous. All the members of the club have well-developed cultural insight, and sometimes they understand each other too well to be critical--their ability to intuit unexplained feelings and gaps in cause-and-effect actions can be a detriment when they are giving feedback. We have to keep encouraging them to ask for explicitness that sometimes to them seems silly--like stating the obvious. 

The same cultural skill brings a richness to their writing. A standard tenet of writers' workshops is the advice, "Show, don't tell." Good writers often don't say that they felt emotions; they show what they looked like. It is a delight to throw this "Show, don't tell" concept out to a group from a listener-responsible culture, such as our recent Leading Young Writers workshop who have all spent their lifetimes reading unspoken meanings. The day I asked the group of ten teachers what SAD looked like, immediately, in silence, without any questions, I had in front of me ten different postures evoking sadness. If I'd taken a photo, it would have been a poem--to the listener-responsibles out there!

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[1] Similar to the distinction John Hinds made about languages in 1987 when he wrote "Reader Versus Writer Responsibility: A New Typology" in Connor & Kaplan (Eds.) Writing across languages: analysis of L₂ text.