Writing

I spent all my summers during high school retaking all my English classes. During the regular year at school I flunked every English class I took for the first three years. I passed with a D- my last year.

Mostly it was my spelling. They had spelling test of what they called core words, thirty-three word each time. I was lucky if I got ten of them right.

Beginning with the third grade, when how things were spelled stopped making sense, I haven’t been able to spell to save my life. All those red checks on the papers can really discourage a guy. Pretty soon, my grammar went the way of my spelling.

I find it quite ironic I like to write just about more than I like to do anything, Thankfully, most of what they were pushing as good English is very superficially related to good writing. Granted, you do have to be able to make your self clear, but you can do that pretty much with spell check and reading out loud and putting periods and commas where the pauses are. You can’t rely on spell check; it doesn’t know the difference between there and their, for instance.

There’s a good little book put out by Random House called The Bad Spellers Dictionary, for those of you like me who don’t spell good enough to use a regular dictionary. You know who you are.

For grammar and how to write in general there’s a short little book – it is short; I promise – called The Elements Of Style by Strunk and White. That’s E.B. White. You might have heard of him. Anyway, it’s kind of the bible of usage among actual writers.

So, if you haven’t been totally ruined my your English teachers, I'm sure there are some good ones somewhere, writing can be a fun thing and its mysteries are not insurmountable.