David Foster Wallace, first Roy E. Disney Professor of Creative Writing and English at Pomona College, widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, wrote, "In this country, Standard Written English is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power and prestige, and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is just How It Is. You can be glad about it or sad about it... [You can] decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I'll tell you something if you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you're going to have to communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our nation uses to talk to itself."
What do you think about Wallace's idea that using an agreed upon standard of professional language is essential to success in American culture regardless of other considerations? Why or why not? Where do you feel producing SWE lands on Bloom's Taxonomy as explained in this
module?
