Columbia University’s Teacher’s College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education–a journal of research+ in the education field–invited me to write a review of James D. Williams’ text, Language Acquisition and Academic Writing. I real life ain’t feel like it for many reasons: 1. I’m writing a thesis; 2. I’m one year behind my writing an interview essay; 3. I’m teaching two summer classes; and 4. white male professor scholars always get to publish shit that is rarely earthshattering to the Black woman teacher who’s been making a way out of no way sans publishing about her endeavors. Nonetheless, I took the unpaid labor because I remember (& honor) Trudier Harris’s 1984 review of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, wherein–after going in on Walker, the media, & Walker’s Celie, Harris calls for Black women professor scholars to write reviews–to be the critical voice of literature. Otherwise, white folks (& their mediums) will be left to review, name, validate (& further appropriate) knowledge & culture. & t’ain’t no good reason Black folks should not be naming, affirming, & propelling thought.

And so, my labored review:

While reading Williams’ (2023) Language Acquisition and Academic Writing, I am engrossed in a writing project grounded in Audre Lorde’s (1984) Sister Outsider, so I may not be the most objective reviewer, for Williams’ work reflects the white father who told us, writes Lorde (1977): “I think, therefore I am” (p. 38), thus discrediting feeling as a valid and vital epistemology, which thereby discredits (and dehumanizes) the feeling Black woman. According to Lorde, writing 46 years ago, “[W]ithin living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought” (p. 39). And I’ll be damned if Williams’ sentiments regarding the composition classroom and his approach to teaching academic writing ain’t that. His entire argument for a reputable [read: logical or capitalist or patriarchal] composition practice depends on lambasting expressivist writing along with composition theorists he claims offered/s little to no theories at all.

According to Williams, “In academic fields a good theory must be tested repeatedly to determine its efficacy and reliability, or what we might want to call its ‘truth value’” (p. 7). Unfortunately, however, Williams argues that composition studies ain’t really a field of study; “it seems instead to be merely a practice” [author’s emphasis] (p. 10). He claims because very few graduate level composition programs require students to take courses in linguistics, writing pedagogy, statistics, and empirical research methods (pp. 10-12), they fail to equip graduate students with cognitive thinking and research skills that enable their theorizing and implementing a writing pedagogy supporting the academic writing college students are expected to do outside of their English courses. As a result, students graduate with no knowledge “related to teaching students how to produce real writing for real audiences, he says” (p.13). Neither do they graduate with teaching practice nor with any connection “to a research strand that might reasonably be aligned with pedagogy and the rationale for requiring students to take years of writing classes” (p. 13). Instead, says Williams, writing teachers, fluent in “personal experience assignments as a form of psychotherapy” (p. 15) rely on “diarist” writing practices to garner “student introspection and self-knowledge,” which are “widely held notions in composition studies” (p. 18)—notions, he avows, derived from “peeping Toms who seek to gape into the private lives of students” (p. 49). Willliams concludes that “writing studies appears to have the unique distraction of being one of the few academic areas in which knowledge of the subject is irrelevant to the task” (p. 48). yiKes! He goes on and on, through 53 pages, ripping expressivist writing, composition theories, the process movement, and the “unlearned” writing teacher, while showboating his intellectual prowess and measure. Dude clearly feels a way about emotive writing practices, students’ rights to their own language, truth-telling and freewriting, for he so passionately expresses his aversions throughout his text. And his tantrum is off-putting.

Nonetheless, once one gets through all that, coupled with the staggering statistics regarding America’s piss poor educational system and literacy rates Williams provides, along with his relishes in classical rhetoric, neuroscience, and critical race theory—which he seemingly opposes—one may glean his recommending language acquisition as the method by which composition teachers may support first year college writers in learning the “insider language” of their chosen majors to be right on. Basically, Williams’ book can be summarized in one paragraph:

Language acquisition, which has been empirically proven to be innate, happens when the brain is exposed to the language one aims to acquire (p. 55). Thus, as children maturate through their at-home communities, they naturally pick up that community’s language—like Black kids speaking Black English. Therefore, “language is a social action” [author’s emphasis] (p. 60), and as such, says Williams, “Just as we use speech to communicate with specific audiences, we also use writing to communicate with specific audiences. Just as we use language to create social bonds, we use writing, especially academic writing, to create social and professional bonds” (p. 65). Therefore, to assist first year writing students with acquiring the academic writing skills expected of their chosen majors, composition teachers should immerse students in the academic readings and research styles associated with those majors (p. 78) as well as verbally instruct them in the standard and formal standard registers that further support students’ acquiring academic language (pp. 66-68).

Simple. But make no mistake: Williams’ proffer is neither earth shattering nor new; he ain’t the first one to propose such a technique (Falk, 1979; Menyuk, 1995; Stein, 1986). As a matter of fact, although he attempts to discredit Andrea Lunsford early on his argument (pp. 37-38), her attention to language varieties in the Everyday Writer (2009) handbook he critiques endeavors to assuage the challenges writing students may encounter when composing academic papers in the “insider language” Williams suggests (Lunsford, pp. 306-325). Additionally, her handbook, like many others (Axelrod, et al., 2022; Lunsford, 2021; Palmquist & Wallroff, 2023), provides student writers with the varied documentation styles (APA, MLA, Chicago, CSE) to which Williams argues first year composition students need exposure and practice so encouraging their ability to write across the curriculum. However, what’s more consequential about Williams’ argument besides his demonstrating how much smarter he is than other composition theorists and practitioners is his intent on debasing other ways of knowing and being a writer while propelling “real” writing as a form of labor profiting America’s capitalist democracy.

Click here to read the complete review.