Yanlin Weng(Teresa)
3/19/13
Zach Kelly
Level 3A
Draft 3
One of Henrietta’s relatives said to Skloot, “If you pretty up how people spoke and change the things they said, that’s dishonest.” This means that after people tell you about their story with their dialect, if you want to another people understand easily, using your own language and your way of speaking to tell them, is dishonest. I think it will lose their original meaning and doesn’t respect the addressor. Everyone has their way of speaking, their manner of speaking, and everyone’s gesture and emotion is unique. As the audience, you must blend in their emotion and hear the original, so that it can keep the story’ truth.
In the book the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks, the author Rebecca Skloot adopted the dialect in which people spoke to her. In this book, we can see more different words such as “colored” because the author used the language of their times and backgrounds, and she has adopted the words interviewees used to describe their worlds and experience. This way of writing is good for readers to know the story’s setting and truth. So what impact did the decision to maintain speech authenticity have on the story? This approach helps the reader better understand the perspective of the Lacks family members. We know they are black and poor; they don’t have good education, so they only have poor language, and they have different accent: The Lackses speak in a heavy Southern accent, and Lengauer and Hsu speak as nonnative English speakers. Sometimes when we hear the way of speaking, we can judge what the person like. For instance, uncultured person speaks poor language; if you get more education, you speak politely. In this book, the author entirely caught the character.
Language can change every time. We always use the different way of speaking in different situation, but don’t lose the own original.