Like my colleague Ben Yagoda, I was intrigued by Teddy Wayne’s recent New York Times article on modes of speaking, but for a different reason. Toward the end of the article, Wayne observes that, unlike social-media writers or radio hosts,
In disciplines like academics, technology and finance, many speakers pepper long speeches with “right.” Their pitch does not rise on the word, which comes in the middle of a series of statements — “analytics are most valuable over long periods, right, than shorter ones, so … ” — rather than at the end.
I had not noticed this phenomenon. Excited by the possibility of a groundbreaking Lingua Franca post, I went looking for examples of it. I trolled the Internet and plumbed the depths of journals like American Speech, Academe, and the International Review of Qualitative Research. Coming up empty, I wrote to Mr. Wayne, who informed me that the prevalence of the uninflected right in the middle of sentences spoken by academics and others was purely his own and his editor’s impression.
Hmm. Well, given that this particular claim concludes an article in our newspaper of record, with a summarizing statement that right “is not, therefore, delivered as a question that gives the listener a chance to respond to and possibly refute, but as a quick statement that is at once self-affirming … and condescending,” one might ask for the same thing we beg of our students: evidence. I was disappointed to learn that this sweeping claim stemmed from anecdotal observation.
But the exercise got me wondering about my own impressions of my, and my colleagues’, distinctive manner of speaking in the classroom. There are few audio- or videotapes of “normal” classroom address by professors; most available are canned performances. Here are some things I’ve noticed — and I mean none of them to imply a generalization about academic idiom.
• My thesis adviser, decades ago, spoke without notes in what I was certain were bulleted lists. He would begin, “I think you want to say something like the following,” and then the list would follow, with his thumb and forefinger nipping the air at shoulder height to perform the bullets. I have since noted this same tendency, though not as commonly performed, in other professors. As I move into my fourth decade as a teacher, I begin to feel the itch to do it myself.
• Over a long lunch, a friend who’s been at this teaching game longer than I have excused himself briefly to use the men’s room. As he stood, he said, “Why don’t you think about that while I’m gone, and then we can keep talking?” He took three steps away from the table, then returned to apologize. It was in his bones by now, he explained. He couldn’t leave a class alone for two minutes without giving them an assignment, and here he was importing that tic into his social life.
• I’m hearing myself, more and more, saying Let me … as in “Let me try to open this discussion up a little with some background on Huxley.” Or “Let me introduce a different notion of point of view.” I never talk this way in front of other audiences or with friends. It’s a pedagogical strategy thinly disguised as a pseudorequest.
• I’ve gradually absorbed a tendency I first noticed in observing colleagues’ classes: the use of first-person plural, often with an interjected rhetorical question, to state either one’s firmly held view or its opposite. As in “We tend to think, don’t we, that the character committing adultery will be the bad guy?” or “These days, we expect most first-person narrators to be unreliable.”
I don’t sit in on classes in biology or art history, and for all I know their verbal tics and strategies are different. What about it, Lingua Francaphiles? ‘Fess up. Do you use right in the middle of sentences? What are your favorite rhetorical devices? Generalize all you want.