Habbou Ibrahim

Professor Colombo Russell

ENGL 110 – Freshman Composition

May 17th 2026

Throughout my time taking freshman composition, I’ve gained massive insight into how we communicate on our day to day basis. What I found most thought-provoking about this course was examining the power language plays into our lives regardless of dialect and fluency. 

For starters, my time delving into personal narratives as an assignment forced me to recognize my own internalized standards and practices of what makes a good or badly done essay. For example, I prioritize auditory performances of an essay rather than allowing it to be read by itself. In my perspective, the act of reading out your own work sets itself as more than just mere text and reinforces the existence of your work as a medium. I’ve done this with my LLN, as I thought projecting my words vocally not only gave my essay an emotional impact, but as well as give audiences a humanizing experience in my work. One could say visual descriptions for an LLN would work just as well in achieving audience to author connection, but in my opinion, vocal performance does more justice in elevating your words as illustrations serve more of an extension of them.

Another thing I’ve learned throughout this course was the way rhetoric intersects way more with one’s connection to language rather than one’s understanding of it. Standards on what makes a certain language “proper” or “improper” lends heavy to who’s in power and how they impose their hierarchical beliefs in a systematic level. Academia plays as a huge contender of such rules; in America, academic standards on proper English have historically excluded dialects rooted in minority groups. AAVE (African-American vernacular English) or Black English for one, utilizes certain wording or sentence structures deemed “incorrect” or “incomprehensible”. An example of this perspective coming out to play would be June Jordan’s writings surrounding how American children perceived Black English being used in classrooms. Jordan’s antidote detailed in her 1988’s essay “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You And the Future Life of Willie Jordan” describes Jordan showing off her student Black literature “The color Purple” and eliciting reactions such as “Why she have them talk so funny. It don’t sound right.” And “It don’t look right, neither. I couldn’t hardly read it.”. I found discussions surrounding Black English and AAVE very interesting and took that into my R/S, instead wanting to delve into language hierarchy in a country filled with linguistic diversity, such as Sudan. In my R/S, I used a topic personal to me, my upbringing from a Sudanese household, and wanted to relate it to broader political discussions on how my race and ethnicity works in Sudan compared to how it works in the United States. The Arabic language plays a powerful tool in how one’s identity works in Sudan, as race is not purely judged by physical features but also cultural proximity. Despite Sudanese Arabic being the main dialect spoken by most Sudanese, Egyptian Arabic is somewhat viewed as a standard with almost all Arabic speakers needing to understand Egyptian accents and terminology before indigenous languages of their own ethnic group. I took advantage of how much Arab-centerism in Sudan parallels heavily with how Black people in the United States are treated for their own languages as a way to discuss global anti-Blackness as it pertains to my own experiences both as a Black American and Sudanese-American.

To conclude, the way I view language throughout my time in this course opened my eyes into how we as a society both explicitly and implicitly set rules around how language is used in certain mediums as well as how those set rules are used to convey social and political implications.