Where Writing Centers and Rosetta Stone Meet

Working in the Writing Center comes with a plethora of benefits for just about anyone dedicated to language equality, helpful insight, or two-way conversations between peers about a paper. But something we don’t always talk about as a highlight of our vacuum space between students and professors is the knowledge we receive from the people who walk through our doorway. Assuming you aren’t immersed in the culture of all 92 countries that contribute to Washington State’s student population, you may learn a thing or two from the vast number of international students who seek our services. I consider myself lucky to have met and talked with such a diverse cross section of the world.

I don’t exactly remember what started my interest in the differences between languages based on culture. Maybe it set in as a result of seeing paper after paper and student after student with a shared experience: feeling silenced, being told they just don’t have what it takes to be successful writers at this university. Many of these students struggle to find their voice at all. It doesn’t matter how confident a writer someone is; if they repeatedly hear how they simply don’t “get it,” they will start to believe it.

It might have been that I was bewildered by the different styles of papers I was reading day in and day out, and how it seemed that there were fundamental differences in the “common” writing practices between different people from different places. I hesitate to even use that word, common, because one thing you learn at the writing center is that just about nothing is as common as you thought it was. That’s the thing with ethnocentrism; we tend to believe our common practices span across the world as universal laws.

Regardless, I developed this interest in the connections between language and culture and simultaneously realized that my job gives me access to the most diverse pool of primary cultural knowledge in a small room imaginable. Under certain circumstances, such as a writing workshop, I was surrounded by five people from five continents who were fluent in several languages each, English being the only common language in the room. The more questions I asked, the more I learned (imagine that). I wasn’t lecturing or even teaching, really, just talking about experiences, language, government, economy, and culture. The connections wrote themselves on the board. These students from around the world, who often feel marginalized in a rigid system of white winners and you-can-guess-who losers, were not only engaged, but we were all learning about and from one another. Citation styles connected to ownership which connected to Capitalism. An abundance of pronouns and a seemingly scarce amount of information connected to a system of honor and saving face in Japan. Complex and layered meanings of words in Arabic, in conjunction with the gendered nature of the language, were collaboratively traced to the gender relations and sheer longevity of Arabic speaking cultures. We often forget that English is not The Original Language.  You could almost see the lightbulbs going off, over my head the most, I’m sure.
Hopefully, learning about and from one another was a step in creating an environment to break down oppressive systems of language and broaden our view on the world. But I’m more than happy just to settle for acknowledging that we were group of diverse and accepting people getting to know each other and having the chance to express ourselves genuinely.

– Andrew Kissinger –