Soda Speak

    When I was in high school, I had a friend who had a penchant for mishearing song lyrics. He thought the J. Geils Band’s “Freeze-Frame,” was called “Freeze Ray,” and that the Steve Miller Band was singing “big ol’ Jed and Liza,” instead of “big ol’ jet airliner.” My favorite, though, was his conversion of AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” into “Dirty Dean and the Thunder Jeeps,” an obvious rock-and-roll ode to off-roading. And my friend is not alone. Enough of us mishear song lyrics often enough to inspire book collections and websites devoted to our re-workings: one website’s title, www.kissthisguy.com, plays off the famous revision of Jimi Hendrix’s line from “Purple Haze.” 

    In student writing we also often find converted words or phrases. Instead of song lyrics, students give us their reworked versions of common sayings as well as more discipline-specific language. For instance, a former colleague of mine mentioned that one of her students used “soda speak” in a paper. That phrase is, so to speak, a new play on an old favorite. (It is also, I suppose, a description of what happens when a Pepsi executive lunches with someone from Coca-Cola.) Gary Vaughn and Barbara Wenner give several more examples in their article “’Fare from the Madding Crowd’: The Lighter Side of Error in Student Writing,” which was part of the online NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) newsletter last month:

• I was taught grammar such as nouns, verbs, adverbs, proverbs.
• He only wanted to hand out his business cards to booze his eagle.
• A major way of preventing AIDS is to have a long-term monotonous relationship.

Vaughn and Wenner and their colleagues collect these and other examples in a journal they call a “decomposition book” (291—page numbers refer to the first printing of this article in the May 1999 edition of Teaching English in the Two-Year College).

    Now, mentioning these slips of the keyboard is not done in order to ridicule students. Quite the opposite. Vaughn and Wenner ask “What is the use of looking at error in student writing?” and then offer their answer:

            [W]e tried to see the errors in a different light and then deduce logical reasons for their production. Now  
            we’d like to find a way students and teachers might read these examples of student error and go beyond
            embarrassment at the error, recognizing error in student writing as an opportunity to unleash imaginations,
            play with language in the reading of it, and generate text that is more aware of the possibilities in language
            use. (293)

Yes, the outcomes from students are funny, but Vaughn and Wenner also see these sentences as starting points: starting points for in-depth conversations between students and teachers about their writing, and starting points for student work that explores language use and conventions.

    The student-teacher conversations can begin when we grant a certain logic to the students’ work, and consider the meaning that their words do make: “It is true that these examples [. . . ] involve a mis-taking of something read or heard by writers who perhaps inhabit a different interpretative community, yet all of these writers’ images look right, reasonable, in their own terms” (295). No student is intentionally trying to be incomprehensible, and even when misspelling a word or choosing the wrong word, a student can make some degree of sense. For instance, Vaughn and Wenner say that “’He was acting like a pre-Madonna’ has its own inner logic, suggesting how one might have behaved prior to Madonna and her iconoclastic effect upon our culture and mores” (294). Certainly Bob Dylan is a pre-Madonna, as was Johnny Cash. Justin Timberlake, on the other hand, is definitely a post-Madonna.*

    By recognizing the meaning made in these language missteps, and acknowledging students as already members of interpretative communities, we can then talk to them about how to work their way into another community (to make a different meaning) rather than describing their work as simply wrong. Madonna is a cultural reference point for them, a useful one, and “pre-Madonna” has a wonderful connection to “prima donna.” We can consider how “prima donna” encompasses two meanings—1)the principal female singer in an opera; 2) an extremely sensitive, vain, or undisciplined person—and then consider how those meanings connect with Madonna. In this way, students can think of making a lateral move with their writing instead of a vertical one. They are shifting communities. Also, as Vaughn and Wenner claim, students (and teachers) can gain “an appreciation of the dynamic relationship between reader and writer as both recognize the many ways in which written language can be used, moving out and then back into the furrow of expected academic discourse” (297).

    In addition to encouraging conversation between students and teachers, Vaughn and Wenner suggests that these “inadvertently playful errors” can be used as prompts for student exercises: “Setting up a menu of error for students to read might be another way of playing with mistakes and finding ways to connect with language and increase reading and writing skills” (296). How might students justify certain errors? What other options might they suggest? Vaughn and Wenner wonder if discussion on these errors “might move students into new directions of potential meaning behind a cliché which just misses the mark. [. . . or] might lead to a playful discussion of clichés themselves” (296). [I originally typed the last line with “plyful discussion” and seriously considered leaving it as is.] Working with one another, students can discover how they make meaning with language both as individuals and as a group.

    In many ways, Vaughn and Wenner’s article reminds me of David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” a piece I’ve read and reread the past few years. In the essay, Bartholomae argues that a student “has to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse [. . . ]; he has to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language while finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, on the one hand, and the requirements of convention, the history of a discipline, on the other hand” (135). To do this, students have to “learn to extend themselves, by successive approximations, into the commonplaces [and] set phrases” of an appropriate academic discourse (146). Vaughn and Wenner offer some real examples of students approximating commonplaces and set phrases, and then make a similar argument that we can push students to make some connections with a more standard discourse. We can also emphasize and praise an idiosyncratic approach to language with each student’s reworking.

    What I most appreciate about considering these errors as approximations, as different-meaning phrases, is that it offers me more teaching moments. When I chuckle over a paper, I can take an additional moment and consider what a student has said, instead of what she hasn’t. I can find humor in the new meanings, but even better, I can find productive prompts for furthering my students' understanding of themselves as writers and my own understanding of myself as a representative of various writing communities.

    Also, after reading Vaughn and Wenner, I’m again struck by how much effort students put forth to try and speak in what they believe to be an appropriate manner. They are grasping slippery items, these words, sounding their way through different types of voices and personas. Our students do not aim to make mistakes. And we cannot take their linguistic twists as intentional jabs at us or our conventions. We can, though, appreciate their efforts, and perhaps even learn a new way of phrasing something for ourselves. After all, you have to admit that “Dirty Dean and the Thunder Jeeps” does have a nice ring to it. Soda speak

Works Cited

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” When a Writer Can't Write: Studies in Writer's Block and Other
        Composing Process Problems. Ed. Mike Rose. New York: Guilford, 1985. 134-165.

 Vaughn, Gary, and Barbara Wenner. “’Fare from the Madding Crowd’: The Lighter Side of Error in Student
        Writing.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 26.3 (1999): 291-298.

* Just for fun: can we say that Sean Penn has gone from pre-Madonna to post-Madonna? Perhaps he’s happier now that he’s found the Wright woman.

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MM

PS. If you have any examples of “decompositions” that you would like to share, please consider sending them to michaelmattison@boisestate.edu  or to MS 1525.

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