UCSB’s Dr. Michelle Petty Wins Award for Work on Black Linguistic Justice

Petty and Her Co-Authors Won the Prestigious Richard Braddock Award from ‘College Composition and Communication’

Dr. Michelle Petty | Credit: Matt Perko

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Back in 1974, members of College Composition and Communication, the flagship publication in college writing studies, made a statement about what kind of writing students should be allowed to produce and titled it “Students’ Right to Their Own Language.” The statement, said Dr. Michelle Petty, an assistant teaching professor at UC Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies, came about as more Black students were matriculating in previously segregated universities. Specifically, the statement says that students have a right to “their own patterns and varieties of language — the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style.” In other words, students should be able to write in a style, and with a rhetoric, natural to them.

But in practice, said Petty, students who speak and write dialects outside the realm of Western academic writing can find their work marked up for its style. That can include Black students who grew up engaged with a rich storytelling and linguistic tradition.

“There is so much color, in both the literal and figurative sense, that Black children usually are raised up expecting makes good storytelling or makes good communication, makes entertaining communication, makes worthwhile communication,” Petty said. “And those things are often actively beaten out of our writing, like actively red-penned out of our work.”

Petty is working with an interdisciplinary team of professors, students, and other researchers to help equip Black students to advocate for their writing and improve communication with their teachers in college composition courses. The work also includes information for instructors on how to support Black student’s linguistic agency and offer constructive feedback. Co-authored by Petty as well as Dr. Charity Hudley, Dr. Hannah Franz, Angela Rowell, Marie Tano, and Sierra J. Johnson, their article “Black Linguistic Justice from Theory to Practice” recently won the prestigious Richard Braddock Award from the Conference of College Composition and Communication.

“Black Linguistic Justice from Theory to Practice” details the team’s development of a website to help Black students — as well as the research underpinning its creation. Called Students Right to Their Own Writing, the website includes both a student’s and instructor’s guide.

On the student end, you can find resources like information on types of feedback instructors may give you, and the kind of questions to ask your professor, resources on African-American English in academic writing and across genres. For instructors, you can find details on African-American English in college student writing, types of grading feedback, background on African-American English, and other resources, like samples of constructive feedback for students. The guides include infographics and easily digestible information to improve the content’s accessibility, which may be especially helpful for instructors and students with heavy workloads.

Petty said that in the website’s creation, the team incorporated knowledge and feedback from Black university students in developing the guide, so it could serve as a relevant, practical tool.

“We knew we wanted to have college students be an active part of making what we were doing, in part because we wanted college students to actually use it. We wanted them to make something that other college students would actually want to use,” Petty said.

A screenshot from the website Students’ Right to Their Own Writing, which includes resources for students and instructors. | Credit: Courtesy

Petty herself has a rich linguistic background. With British English, African-American English from the South and New York, and California English all weaving their way into her upbringing by way of her grandparents, parents, and her own experiences.

“I learned to code switch between AAVE [African-American Vernacular English], British English, and American English throughout my childhood,” she said.

Petty lived in the United Kingdom from ages 4 to 8 before moving to the Central Coast of California, which she said was a significant shift.

“I went from being at an elementary school that was fairly mixed racially to being one that was very predominantly white,” Petty said, later adding, “and I went from a place where being bookish was perfectly ordinary to being something that was like a reason for teasing.”

Petty said that through this transition, words kept her anchored. She said she excelled in her high school writing classes only to find, when she started attending Pepperdine University, that her writing started receiving heavy edits.

Petty said that as a college student at Pepperdine, she worked with people one-on-one to meet her professor’s expectations.

“Thankfully, it was a small enough institution that people worked with me one-on-one,” she said. “Which is one of the things that is at the crux of why we created this website in the first place, because we had all experienced, in one shape or form, the power of having one-on-one conversations with the people who are commenting on our writing.”

Petty said that many students, especially first-generation college students, don’t go into university with a working knowledge of instructor’s editing shorthand and feedback style. The website is a means to help clarify that.

Linguistic and dialect diversity in English writing goes beyond syntax. Petty said she was in graduate school when she realized her instructors weren’t generally correcting her on syntactic differences between AAVE and traditionally academic English, but rather her rhetoric.

“It was really more about the kinds of storytelling and communicating and information giving that are common in the Black community versus what is expected in a very white, linear academic paper,” she said.

Academic writing standards focus on linear narrative, discourage descriptive words, and demand an emotional distance from the writer. Petty said it was influenced in part from the European Enlightenment tradition, which focused on logic and facts and came out of Europe’s religious-centric Middle Ages, as well as the efficiency centered in the Industrial Revolution.

But other dialects, like AAVE, include rhetoric features that operate outside this standard — things like intertextuality, repetition, and call-and-response.

“I think that the remixing and sampling and testifying and playing the dozens and everything else that are so deeply a part of not just African-American Vernacular English but like Black rhetoric and Black storytelling is distinctly undesired from academic writing, which is a shame,” Petty said.

There’s power in this rhetoric, Petty said.

“I think that there’s a lot we could draw on from African-American discourse for thinking about how to make information that might be quite serious to still be carried with some humor, to still be ingested with some liveliness, to be braided with story,” she said.

Petty’s work comes at a time when federal regulations are challenging research that examines diversity. The Trump administration has worked to prohibit federal funding for projects deemed part of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), and some universities, including the University of Michigan and Case Western Reserve University, have closed their DEI offices.

But Petty said that outside pressure is no reason to stop doing this kind of work. She said that for those with the security to advocate for its purpose and need should continue to be vocal.

“We will continue to do freedom work and liberation work and really true American patriotic work, embracing the fullness of the American story regardless of whether or not it’s funded by the federal government. So, I have faith that that will still happen. But yes, absolutely it complicates things,” she said.

For Petty, the Braddock Award is affirmation that scholars and teachers still value this kind of work — that they want to support it. She says that receiving the award — and collaborating with her fellow researchers — is humbling in the best way.

You can find Students Right to Their Own Writing and ‘Black Linguistic Justice from Theory to Practice’ by clicking these hyperlinks.