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You’re terrible at writing!                                                                                    

Posted at: May/07/2009 : Posted by: mel

Related Category: Perspectives,

You’re terrible at writing! Is this something you’ve been told? I sure heard it a lot. I still remember my school years and the pain and suffering I went through in English class. Punctuation mystified me, I never could spell, and diagramming a sentence was just plain old punishment. Sometimes I wonder how I ever managed to graduate high school. Math, science, and PE, those were my classes. I guess I’m writing this because I want to tell a little story.

My high school English classes involved a lot of reading followed by writing short or long papers analyzing some aspect of what I had just read. I obviously did not like everything thing that I was told to read. Trust me, for a 16 year old boy by the third Shakespearean play, they all started to blend together. But the reading was nothing compared to the torture of writing about it. I had to create an outline, then an introduction, body paragraphs, and finally a conclusion. Using pen & paper, or a typewriter I would attempt to build the final product to turn in. Half way through if I suddenly realized a sentence didn’t work or I wanted to change a thought I would have to start all over. Then there is the burden of spelling. You can’t fix the spelling of a word if you don’t know it well enough in the first place to recognize that your personal spelling is wrong. My speaking vocabulary was good because of the broad vocabulary used by my parents. Unfortunately I did not know how to spell many of the words that I knew how to say and use. Rather than continually open a dictionary, I therefore “dumbed down” or made less sophisticated the words and thoughts I used for my writing homework and projects. Sounds pretty grim.

When I got to college I had an English teacher who gave me a pocket dictionary and told me I was destine to carry it with me for the rest of my life. Fortunately, the same professor also took a personal interest in my dilemma and taught me some basic and very simplistic techniques and rules for creating a viable sentence. She was somewhat amazed that there was such a gap between how I spoke and how I wrote.

My professional growth was distinctly hindered by my writing skills. I openly made career decisions based on avoiding having to write. If management offered me an advancement that would involve writing responsibilities, I would turn it down to avoid the embarrassment and criticism. When I attended meetings I could “talk-the-talk”, but I could not and would not write to a similar level. My messiah was the advent of the personal computer. I don’t know if I should face towards the Silicon Valley, or Redmond Washington for a prayer of thanks…but one or the other deserves the credit and appreciation.

Writing tools like word processors are a wonder if used effectively. Most modern word processors will identify spelling errors and catastrophic grammar issues if those features are turned on, and no one should ever have them turned off. I know, the spell checker won’t identify wrong word usage, you still have to accept some responsibility to proof read your own work. More important for me is that word processors allow for me to write in a “write-once, edit-many” format. The writing structure I was taught in school was a very top down format building from an outline. You can still do top down writing with a word process, but you don’t have to if that format doesn’t fit well with you. I like to just start dumping thoughts into the word processor based on a given subject or theme. Some of the thoughts come in a logical flow, some don’t. After this “brain-dump”, I can look at what I have and begin using drag-n-drop or copy-paste to merely rearrange things. Then as I review I can see easily where to flesh things out, or where more editing is called for. The good news is that the rewriting process is no where near as painful as before tools like this existed.

What has not changed is that I still do not understand the intricacies of grammar. I also have plenty of people who in my professional environment who still criticize my writing, but writing is no longer painful. Writing for me is almost fun and it is definitely much easier to write in the same manner that I speak, or at least closer to it. For me, the closer the writing is to my speaking, the higher the comfort factor. Is there a lesson here, probably. For me the lesson is that I don’t have to make choices anymore that are driven by a need to hide from writing, and no one else should either. Much of the impression we make on others is driven by how we communicate, writing should be an opportunity to make a good impression.

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