Creating my future, one miracle at a time

As a side note, I might add that it's not unusual to get a call from my mother that begins with some strange or interesting question on a point of trivia she can't remember or the name of a song she can only remember one line of, etc.

So my mother calls tonight, and the conversation starts with:

Granny:  in a business letter, what punctuation comes after the 'Dear Ms. Smith'?
me:  Uh, colon?  (the hesitation here is not because I'm unsure of the answer, but because I know this must be a trick question)
G:  yes!  (yells to my dad) Sherron knew!
me:  you know people who don't?
G:  only my secretary and our media/PR person, and every one else in the office I asked. 

    [Okay, we can discount most of the guys because they're the non-verbal, engineering types.  But none of the people who've been sending out letters and proposals and writing ads and articles for publication and copy for the website !?!]

me:  *speechless* (still convinced there's got to be a punchline)

Unfortunately it wasn't.  She told me the story of how she found this out about the PR woman, how she actually had to ARGUE the point with her, force her to change it in a cover letter going out on a very big proposal.  She worries that she hasn't been proofreading them before now, because who would suspect that a 45 year old woman with a degree in media communication would not know basic grammar?    She's aware it's a problem with a lot of the young people just coming out of college tho.  Just last week she threw out a resume she'd received because the job applicant misspelled something.  She says in this world, where there are plenty of applicants for every job, there's no point in even considering people sloppy or lazy or ignorant enough to not make sure their resume is perfect.

She wonders if she's a dinosaur. 

I'm sure we are, she and I.

And I hate that.

I've been thinking about the_theorist 's comment about why would it matter if they get the point across.  And I acknowledge that one of the wonderful things about English is its flexibility, its easy acceptance of new words, etc.   But I think I have an answer to that, and I'm going to post it when I can clearly verbalize it

Why don't I write? I know I'm quite literate, and knowledgeable enough about a wide enough variety of things to be interesting. My friends tell me I write witty and engaging correspondence. I used to write, eons ago. I know people enjoy conversations with me, and (sincerely) laugh at all the right places. And of course, I have a firm grasp on the mechanics involved. I'm a great editor. But something about actually writing, scares me silly. I'm convinced I can't do it. Shouldn't do it.

I know there is at least one good trauma that I've blamed it on. I am a victim of public school. For my English (allegedly G&T -- gifted and talented -- a step above honors) class my senior year in high school I had one of those sadistic, anti-intellectual, soul-killing, time-marking, lazy, tenured "teachers" everyone knew to try to avoid. She wasn't really the first. But definitely the log-sized "straw" that broke my back. There were only two of us who qualified for G&T, and so they stuck us in her Honors English. An embarrassingly easy class. Molly and I were to do the same basic curriculum as the honors students, but with an unspecified ?extra?.

This teacher actually gave weekly grammar tests. TO SENIORS! And I mean things like "circle the nouns in the following sentences". And weighted the class so that the grades on these were counted more than anything else. Which turned out to be good for me, since there was hard proof to make her give me the A+ for the course. I really deserved it for other things, but writing grades are a lot more "subjective" --which just means the student is at the mercy of the teacher. In my reading about education and homeschooling since, someone wrote that the reason schools teach grammar for 12 years (instead of the 6 months it deserves)is that it is easy to grade.

Besides the tests, every paper got two grades: Content and Grammar. My Grammar grades varied. There were 8 automatic F's -- one was not putting periods at the ends of sentences, and for some reason, some mental block I had, I would leave the period off the last sentence of the paper. Or use "passive voice" (another of the deadly 8)in a sentence on the order of "I was born..." where obviously I should have written "My mother birthed me..." and no, it doesn't matter that that shifts the focus of my sentence, only active voice is correct in her realm. But Grammar grades could be raised if one corrected all the mistakes. An easy enough thing, except where she just sometimes made up her own rules. And believe me, she was absolute authority in her class room. Even taking her her own text and showing her the rule, she would tell me why I was still wrong.

Every paper I wrote got an F on Content! No explanations, no notes, just F. Except one. When we read Canterbury Tales and everyone had to write an essay. Molly and I were given some leeway in what we could write. I loved the tales. The language, the stories, the structure, everything. I actually got creative and wrote my own modern day "Prologue" in the style of the translation we were using, with people from the class as my companions on my pilgrimage. She was at least cagey enough to know that this was undeniably good. And I had complained about enough of the other F's by this point, and gotten other teachers (previous teachers who had been the ones to rave about my writing enough to get me stuck in that program) reluctantly involved enough,(and I was on the newspaper and LOTS of people had been reading my articles)that she knew better. I got a C+. And an F on grammar. Even a poem, it seems, must have a period at the end.

After a while I just quite trying. I'd turn in any old trash. I quite reading the literature, -- why bother -- skipped class often, doodled in my journal when I was there, say to take the grammar test that week. Some days I'd just leave to go to the rest room, and never come back. I'd hide out in the newspaper office. My journalism teacher was pretty sympathetic.

I knew even then that the old bat was wrong. I had plenty of contrary evidence. And it wasn't just me. Molly and a few other people I knew to be good writers and smart people got the same treatment. But I let her throw me. So I've not written since then. It's stupid, It's not enough to have silenced me all these years, but it has.

I really need to get past it. I think I will start to honestly try