Ella Maria Diaz, associate professor of English, published an essay on language and academic criticism for the Diacritics blog:
"In the midst of a national reckoning over visual and symbolic representation in the United States—or, the grassroots takedowns and official removals of statues of colonial figures and founders of the nation during the summer of 2020—there are other modalities of representation that continue to elide authentic diversity in and of the public square. Voice is one such modality and there are many people in the United States who, like me, speak several versions of one language; we move in and out of professional voices that are full of office jargons or scholarly lexicons and slide into our everyday speech in which we code-switch and use what I often refer to as my home tone. It’s not a new idea that language is personal; but I’ve found that in scholarly publishing, the historical contexts of one’s language are undervalued and dismissed. This dismissal takes place in the homogenizing editorial process—when a person’s voice is standardized, revised, and refitted for grammatical rules, spelling, and 'clarity.'
"To be fair, editorial revisions can be helpful; they can push academic writers to grow, moving them closer to more precise statements of purpose. But there are other times when changes made to an author’s voice are exclusionary, reducing the potential or possibility of intellectual thought and meaning, as well as authentic diversity in a shared scholarly discourse. These instances, in my experience, are due to the discomfort an author’s voice causes editors and copyeditors who may believe that grammatical rules are universal and must be adhered to in order for prose to be understood and, perhaps, respected, by their reading audience. In this case, an editor and copyeditor may also request additional notations for misspelled words in works of art from which the author is citing or quoting, as I experienced in a recent round of copyedits for one of my publications."
Read Diaz's full essay here.
Ella Maria Diaz is an associate professor of English and Latina/o Studies at Cornell University. Her book Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: Mapping a Chicano/a Art History (2017) explores the art, poetry, performance, and political activism of a vanguard Chicano/a art collective founded in Sacramento, California, during the US civil rights era. For this work, Diaz won the 2019 Book Award for the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Association (NACCS). Diaz has published in several anthologies as well as articles in English Language Notes (ELN), ASAP/Journal, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and Chicana-Latina Studies Journal.
