Anre S. Morain

Freshman Composition English

Prof. Brenna Crowe

9/26/2020

Growing up I wasn’t too interested in language, like I read often but I wasn’t interested in the language itself as much as I was interested in the stories you could tell with it. It wasn’t till after I was halfway through high school that I gained any appreciation for language and its intricacies. I began studying other languages in hopes of spreading my horizons to other forms of literature and the like. Before the revelation though, I was extremely uninterested in both language and english

My freshman year of highschool was the perfect example of this because I’ve never been a fan of english as a class and my freshman english class was probably the most harrowing class I’ve ever had to deal with. It was a very relaxed freshman year all things considered. My other classes such as history, biology, math, and tech were majorly uneventful which left english (my worst subject) to come in and ruin my plans for an uneventful freshman year. In my freshman english class there were (for me) two goals: find a way to fit in with my peers and pass the class with a deeper understanding of the english language – specifically bettering my writing capabilities as at that point in time my writing skills were all over the place. Truth be told though I only ever succeeded in making my english teacher hate teaching me. Accomplished via an accent not my own. You see I’m initially from New York but I went to middle and highschool up and down the east coast so my accent is pretty bog standard ,but in an effort to fit in with my southern peers I had shifted from my more northern accent to a more southern form of ebonics where you would slur more words together and raise your inflections a bit more on certain words and phrases. This particular accent made it incredibly difficult for more standard english speaking people to understand our more “colorful” rendition of the shakespearean and homeric plays we would read for class. Being that this accent was not only more difficult to understand but prone to cursing (simply by accident in most cases) I made it simultaneously harder for myself to properly communicate the messages of  Shakespeare and harder for my teacher to have full and complete control of her class at any given moment. I -with aid from fellow class clowns- sent the class into a spiral of laughter any number of times when doing public readings and acting scenes from Shakespeare’s tragedies. Seeing that my refusal to read without the accent had caused some amount of laughter and enjoyment, a young me would decide to exaggerate the accent more and more over the course of the school year. I began with my near omission of the letter H from any given word like hospital or house. By the time we got to the end of the year I was basically speaking an entirely different dialect of english.Honestly speaking the way I was talking wouldn’t have been such a problem if it was my natural accent and she hadn’t heard me speak normally. Each time I noticeably exaggerated my accent I was sent to the office to have a chat with my teacher and mother and each time I pleaded innocence, totaling a solid 5 separate times where I had to talk my way out of punishment because of a dumb joke that I felt the absolute need to carry on. It wasn’t until the end of the year on a hot summer evening that I was caught due to my mother noticing the slight southern twang to my very standard and proper american accent, a shift I had earned by doing a very facetious accent almost every other day. I had to double down on my house chores on top of being barred from hanging out with my friends on the block, as well as write a letter of apology to my freshman english teacher. Ultimately it was a pretty sound loss because I moved schools the next year so any friends I had started to make were to be forgotten with time, and I had to spend a good portion of the summer that year reteaching myself the lessons that I had missed along the way, things about punctuation and clause usage. On the upside I spent a lot more time reading classics like the iliad and the journey to the west. After that year I had completely stopped using that accent and a couple others, to my surprise benefit dropping the accents made me more charismatic and comfortable with both of my natural accents and going in and out of my formal and at-home accents.The year I spent in that class was helpful in another unexpected way too. After spending so much time being the class clown I was capable of speaking in front of large groups of people with almost no issue, my public speaking became a matter of nuance and finesse rather than stagefright. 

Another major event although not as long and not as dragged out would be the time that I MC’ed for a talent a couple of years back. I realized in front of a crowd of people my usual timid speaking voice simply would not do, this was a performance after all. I spent the first half of the show getting used to the anxiety of being on stage of so many eyes filled with expectations. The latter half was significantly more fun for me because after breaking out of my shell a bit I dropped the formalities and loosened up a whole lot after making the crowd laugh and applause. I don’t think I would win any awards for best MC but it did make me realize just how much your language and social behavior depends on the level of comfortability. By the end of the show I was singing ‘killing me with softly’ for the crowd instead of announcing the events for the evening.