When I first started teaching, I thought that reviewing over student drafts would be less about guiding my students through ways to better clarify their ideas and more like the time I spent editing fellow classmates’ work throughout undergrad and grad school. This would look like helping them rephrase awkward wording and small typos that weren’t detectable by spell/grammar check that would make a work look unprofessional. Finding that blatant error after you have already submitted something like a final project or even a résumé just feels absolutely cringeworthy.

Of course, this all occurred before the rampant adoption of browser extensions akin to the AI-enhanced “Grammarly” and similar programs. I have had some students begrudgingly admit that they used Grammarly, sapling, and some others that I forget the name of. At first, these extensions seemed to let my students down quite a bit but it seems that they, both my students and these grammar AIs, have learned quite a bit about writing because now I feel like I rarely have to watch out for grammar fumbles. As that one Malcolm in the Middle meme portrays, “The future is now old man” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta41xU-tkFA.

In response to the reading, “There is One Correct Way of Writing and Speaking,” I felt similar to some of my colleagues comments and replies. The article felt outdated in ways such as Pattanayak’s word choices to describe what writing and speaking in the class feels like. Even if I assumed that the opening sentences were also part of the title which indicate exactly what the bad idea about writing that is being examined, at least in our population of english instructors, we no longer teach or encourage the one golden standard of “correct” english. Even I criticized that metaphorically her audience left the show a generation ago. We encourage all discourse communities and find that learning english in all of its forms is an enriching experience. However, it is important to remember that although now we accept different forms and styles of english, language is still being used as a powerful exclusionary tool against people of poor and/or working class backgrounds as well as new english speakers.