When I first stepped into an official college classroom inside prison, I had no idea that my writing had value. I was always told that I was an articulate person, an attribute that made me stick out amongst my peers in and outside of the correctional facility. I took on the habit of quickly learning the local vernacular to better camouflage my love of complex, formal language. Yet, those pesky, multisyllable symbols still managed to sneak out of my mouth and into my conversations at the most inopportune of times. Slurring or mincing words could not mask the slip of “multitudinous,” “ambivalence,” or “fruition” from my everyday speech. In the classroom, however, as I began to write academic papers, I realized that my grasp of the formal constructions of the English language that came so naturally to me gave me a clear advantage in speaking the local lingo of education.