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Haebin Buchanan
Michelle Liu
ENGL 302 A
14 November 2016

Curation

Without even looking for the sake of answering the prompt, four artifacts stood out to

me as soon as they were assigned from Fakes. These artifacts were I CAN SPEAKTM,

Permission Slip, Chaucer Tweets the South by Southwest Festival and My Beard,

Reviewed. The connection I saw throughout these different fake artifacts was the idea of

“correct” and “incorrect” language. Correct, meaning the proper, scholarly grammar and

syntax that is accepted my society versus incorrect, meaning colloquial, poor grammar and

syntax that is frowned upon my most of society (teachers, professors and employers). For

the sake of clarification, I will share my initial readings of each artifact and draw in one at

a time to connect them.

To begin, by itself, I CAN SPEAKTM is a letter from a worker to a consumer in response

to her wanting to return an item. There is a definite informal tone in the contents of the

letter because he drops trances of himself in the letter rather than keeping things strictly

professional and to the point regarding her concern. Readers can see the things that are

going on his life, looking past his work life from the things that he talks about. Also, we

can analyze the things that he says and how and see what type of person he is. From the

way he begs for sympathy by giving his personal story, I see that he can be a bit

manipulative. However, his want for her to not return the item does not seem to stem from

malicious intent, rather just his own interests.

In Permission Slip, the narrator of this artifact is not educated, and it is very evident in

the way she speaks. She speaks about few different things throughout her narrative, yet it is
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difficult to follow what is going on because of the type of language she uses. The thoughts

on I CAN SPEAKTM and Permission Slip seem very incoherent at this point because they

were read as two different stories, but when brought together, I saw there was a different

story. While reading these together, the things that I paid attention to in each artifact were

totally different from what I saw when reading them by themselves.

When brought into conversation together, I saw that the ‘correct’ way of using

language does not always result in the most accurate description of feeling. For example,

the item that the women in I CAN SPEAK wanted to return was a device that had this

algorithm that allowed the device to read what the baby felt and (questionably) spoke for

the baby is perfect speech so that the parents could understand. However, even the worker

writing the letter said that, that is not what the baby really is feeling or thinking so we see

this margin of error in portraying actual needs. This device also eliminates the chance of

the baby learning to speak by learning from mistakes. When looking at Permission Slip

alongside I CAN SPEAK, we know that the narrator is not of high education and she speaks

as she pleases. The difference between her and the people in I CAN SPEAK is that I can get

a feel for the type of personality she has. I can hear her voice as I read, and she seems like

such a real person with 3D features. And I believe that this is because, although her use of

language is terrible (by societal standards), she uses language that accurately portrays her

feelings. By her choice of words and how she chooses to say them, I find myself feeling

something close to what the girl must feel.

Adding in another artifact, My Beard, Reviewed is a collection of reviews of someone’s

beard. When reading this alone, I wondered if it was making fun of how just about

anything can be reviewed, even the weirdest things, but when I read it closely in respects to
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I CAN SPEAKTM and Permission Slip, the reviews in the artifact are all talking about how

much that they like the beard, but how do we really know that they love the beard?

Everything is just written words and they use similar language saying that they love it, but

how do other people really know the exact feeling that someone else feels from really

loving something? For example, to explain you really love something, someone might say,

“I can’t even contain myself when I think about it because (*insert scream*) I can’t even!,”

while pounding on something because they can’t properly portray the actual feeling of love

with proper words. Tying this into I CAN SPEAK, I talked about how I thought the

employee who sent the letter was manipulative, but this is not a definite statement. From

what I’ve read and connecting him to the people I really know, I can draw this assumption,

but the truth is that I really do not know because language is ambiguous. While he leaves

room for me to assume, he might just be a person who likes to share person details, but

really means nothing by saying things like that. But when you used expressive, but

‘wrong’ language, then it seems to be more accurate in portraying feelings and emotions of

someone. In turn, this reflects what type of person they can be.

This is not to say the incorrect language is always acceptable and that is shown in

Chaucer Tweets the South by Southwest Festival. Most people are familiar with the social

media site, Twitter, and the short messages that are shared are called tweets. The tweets

that are being shared in this artifact definitely seem weird because the language that is

being used almost seems old and complex, but you soon realize that they are filled with

spelling errors. It also talks about hipsters a lot, which made me wonder if it is ridiculing

hipsters. But when brought into play with the conversation that I’ve been sharing, this

particular artifact turns my argument in a different direction. It seems that the people who
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are tweeting are spelling all sorts of words incorrectly while sounding like they are

educated in old English. This could be a ridicule of the younger generations that live on

social media and reply on text and chat to converse with peers. They believe that they are

educated and try to portray this, but in truth, people are becoming less educated due to

technological advances. While incorrect language could be helpful in accurately portraying

one’s feelings and emotions, the incorrect use of language stemming from technology is

not an acceptable form.

The wonder that explored through these artifacts was the idea of improper language

being more expressive for true feelings rather than proper language, which is more

ambiguous than we lead it to be. As a society, we tell people to “use your words” to

explain what they feel or want, all the while analyzing a single sentence from a book and

assigning subjective meanings to it. If it is so much simpler to express feelings through

improper language, why do we have proper language and why is it that, that is the way in

which we speak?