What follows are my remarks from today’s webinar, Writing Outside the Academy. I didn’t have time to give the remarks after the second set of three asterisks, reflecting on public writing/public medievalism and yesterday’s events, but referred to them in the discussion.
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My topic this afternoon is audience and how my role as a teacher shapes how I think about writing for the public and how I envision that public — in other words, how the pedagogical part of my job helps to shape my writing outside the academy.
I am currently working on a book-length project for a general audience on the past and present of the Spanish language, a project that has very much grown out of my teaching. It has been shaped by redesigning a class I had inherited from a retired colleague on the history and dialectology of Spanish, and by the ways in which students come into college and into my class thinking about language in very conservative and limiting ways, often shaped by introductory language pedagogy and popularly available resources about language in general and Spanish in particular. My students often come in to my class as strident prescriptivists, because that is how they have been taught Spanish and taught about Spanish, regardless of whether it is a learned language for them or whether they are heritage or native speakers, and so they end up very judgmental about the language as it changes over time and even about their own Spanish.