Response to some Readings on Memory and Writing

Four Cs was great and oddly I found myself mentally kicking myself for not having written more. My favorite topics were all the rage and I was not participating in the conversations. Memoirs or Memorias or Family Histories were a huge part of the presentations during the convention. Gail Okawa and Victor Villanueva made excellent presentations of their work recovering family histories. Gail's work on her recovery and reconstruction of family history through archival papers, pictures, etc was extremely well done. I found another piece of hers in a Journal of Teaching of Writing which really fit in well with her presentation. I obtained it in a panel with linguists and could see how she's been working at parts of the larger research that she presented at this year's 4Cs for quite some time now. What I noted about her writing is that she uses academic discourse more than Victor did. He uses it but he managed to hybridize it for the presentation. Gail's discourse adhered more to the formality of an academic presentation. Her writing too is more formal than other similar work. Could their be a difference between Asian culture and Latino/a culture that encourages greater formality from one group and not the other?

Francsico Tamayo-Rico did a fine presentation on Englishes and Spanishes.