Your name: 

Guelimanuel Grullon

Completing this worksheet may take more time than you think. It’s worth the time. The information you gather will help you later when writing up assignments. But more importantly, the process of addressing each of the questions below will slowly work to change how you read texts. Keep in mind that some answers will not be obvious or even observable in the text, and so you may have to do some critical thinking and, at times, even some online research. Use full sentences. Take as much space as you need.

Context & Exigence: What topic/conversation is this text responding to? What year is the text published? What is the exigence–that is, what motivating occasion/issue/concern prompted the writing? The motivating occasion could be a current or historical event, a crisis, pending legislation, a recently published alternative view, or another ongoing problem. 

The topic that the text is responding to is how “White English” or “Standard English” is not questionable at all, but how “Black English” is “incorrect” in the way they talk. This text was published in 1988. The motivating issue that prompted this writing is that white people control what kind of English is right or wrong. Some of them say that only White English is correct. Although this kind of English is grammatically incorrect in professional writing, it is not incorrect if it is said verbally.

Author: Who is the author of this text?  What are the author’s credentials and what is their investment in the issue? 

The author of this text is June Jordan, who unfortunately died back in 2002. She was an activist for not only Civil Rights, but for feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. She used Black English for most of her collections and writings, and was an English professor and founded the “Poetry for the People” program in 1991.

Text: What can you find out about the publication?  What is the genre of the text (e.g., poem, personal essay, essay, news/academic article, blog, textbook chapter, etc.)? How do the conventions of that genre help determine the depth, complexity, and even appearance of the argument? What information about the publication or source (magazine, newspaper, advocacy Web site) helps explain the writer’s perspective or the structure and style of the argument?

The genre of the text is a textbook chapter and an essay. The genre makes the texts someone uninteresting to read and makes it long and look boring, although it is an interesting text. It was a textbook chapter in the “Harvard Educational Review” in 1988, which could help the text get some exposure, but will honestly not help in anything else. It was not published or formatted well to present the argument and is indeed long-winded which will make a lot of people lose interest.

Audience: Who is the author’s intended audience? What can you infer about the audience (think about beliefs and political association but also age, class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, profession, education, geographic location, religion, etc.)? Look for clues from the text (especially the original publication) to support your inference.

The author’s intended audience is probably people who discredit black people for the way that they talk and black people to not let anyone change the way that they talk.

Purpose: What is the author trying to accomplish? To persuade, entertain, inform, educate, call to action, shock? How do you know?

The author was trying to accomplish the fact that people don’t need to change the way that they talk just because someone told them that that’s is incorrect. If they understand what you’re talking about, then they should talk the way that they like to talk, no matter how “black” or “broken” it sounds.

Argument: What do you believe is the main claim/idea/argument that the author is trying to communicate? What stance does s/he take? 

The claim that she makes is that White English seem to be the “correct” way to speak English in the United States, or anywhere in that matter, but any accent that they have or the way they use certain words or phrases will make that “version” of English inferior to the “correct” “version”

Evidence: How is the argument supported? Types of support include reasons and logical explanations as well as evidence. Types of evidence include anecdotes, examples, hypothetical situations, (expert) testimony, quotes, citing sources, statistics, charts/graphs, research the author or another source conducts, scientific or other facts, general knowledge, historical references, metaphors/analogies, etc. 

“White standards of English persist, supreme and unquestioned, in these United States. Despite our multi-lingual population, and despite the deepening Black and White cleavage within that conglomerate, White standards control our official and popular judgments of verbal proficiency and correct, or incorrect, language skills, including speech.”

Rhetorical Strategies: What aspects of this text stand out for you as a rhetorical reader? In other words, what do you observe about what the author strategically does (consciously or not) in hopes of appealing to their audience? List here as many observations as you can make about what the text does. 

Shows how you could speak Black English.Shows real-life stories on her experiences with Black EnglishShows how students implemented how to speak black English.

Citation: Add the correct MLA or APA bibliographic entry for this text. Use easybib.com if you prefer.

“June Jordan.” Wikipedia, 23 Sept. 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Jordan.

Notes: What do you want to remember about this text?

This is honestly a very long text when it didn’t need to be. Although this was for a Havard textbook, it is extremely hard to read and will probably only interest college students, when it could have been simplified and shortened a bit to make it interesting and fun to read..