Post

I'm reading David S Mura's A Stranger's Journey and in his section about racialized students in predominantly white MFA programs he talks about Standard Western English being the common language of writing, as opposed to Standard Black English. It's an interesting discussion.

I mentioned this to a professor friend (not MFA) and she talked about a student from Ghana in one of her classes. She suspected that his papers were being done by ChatGPT so she brought him in to talk about it. Yes, he admitted that they were. But not how you might think.

He was using ChatGPT to translate his paper into SWE. So his work, his research and then run it through a translator to ensure that the professor would be able to understand what he was saying. He was writing in English my friends. Not a foreign language, but it might as well be.

I hadn't thought about that, I mean I had thought about the ways in which we all code switch. The ways in which we shift our voice depending on the audience and the ways in which that shift is punished or rewarded. But I hadn't thought about ChatGPT being used this way and the consequences of that

0 reposts1 like

Mura begins his discussion of this by describing a teacher who tells his students that SWE is necessary and Black students be more successful if they do this, like MLK and Toni Morrison etc. He complained about the students saying he was racist, but he never asked why, or what he might be missing.

If you're interested in writing as a craft, the Mura book is excellent by the way. And if you have other books on writing as craft from the POV of racialized or marginalized writers you can drop them here because I'm always interested.