Should Students Write In Their Own Dialect? Fuck That's A Tough One!

Writing in my own dialect has never really crossed my mind, until I read the SRTO. I guess you can say from an early age I learned that following the rules and doing what I was suppose to do was going to get me an A. I was taught in elementary how to write a well written paragraph and the example that might be familiar to most of us is the hamburger paragraph. Even as we moved into high school we still followed the same hamburger outline. 

We went from this:

http://timvandevall.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Hamburger-Graphic-Organizer-01.jpg

To something more complex like this: 

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Thats how I got good grades in elementary, middle school, and high school. Taking my first college class was no different either. It was all analytical, I had to follow a specific outline, which was normal for me. And taking this 214 class was a huge slap in the face, because I had this mind set that the professor has to teach us this, we do it, no questions asked, period! However when Caitlin was like "shouldn't we be able to write however we want?" I was like wait a minute we should!! Shit I know I wouldn't hate English as much if I was able to write in a way were I feel confident about my writing, where I would actually sounds like myself. I probably wouldn't stress about writing essays and being afraid of sounding like a middle schooler. But it got me thinking, yeah we would have a lot more freedom to write but what about after college and we go into the work force? I'm sure they won't appreciate me "cussing" in a financial report or biology paper. I thought whats the point? We would have to work twice as hard and still outside of school have to write academically. I came up with the conclusion that no we shouldn't be allowed to write in our own dialect, only if, and I mean it only if everywhere else outside of school accepts and is okay with us writing in a non academic way. Otherwise we wouldn't succeed, thats the bottom line. 

I know I'm looking at this from a bigger angle but its true! Writing in our own dialect is amazing! But professor right now wouldn't want to read 40+ papers with a bunch of different dialects. (Unless they are Caitlin) Why? Because it makes their job harder. Most of them don't care either, as far as they know they are preparing us for the future. I'm all about change and I would love if I was able to write just like I'm doing right now and not get punished with a C,D, or F for it. But unfortunately thats not how things are or work. These couple of weeks we've been going around in circles, because in class we went back and forth, from yes to no. And still to this day I can't say yes we should or no we shouldn't, I'm kind of in-between. 

Even though I would love for us as student to be able to write in out dialect and still be able to succeed, its not possible unless it accepts by everyone. However I did get something out of this, I decided that it is possible to write in an academic way but still squeeze in a little bit of me. And by that I mean that I am no longer trying to add bigger words, or trying to replace a simple word with a more complex one just so I sound more "sophisticated". Thats not me, I'm going to keep writing in my own simple way, however still following an outline. Even though I still wouldn't be writing in my own dialect I am putting more of a me touch in there, I'm not saying it going to be 100% me and how I really talk but it will still be 60% me which is better than being 0% me. All in all its complicated but the good thing is that Caitlin has opened our eyes and made us think about something that is actually really important, that affects us.