Repressed Memories?
The other day in one of my literature classes, our professor was discussing the Ciceronian method for constructing an effective essay—which, believe me, will trump the canonized five paragraphs any day. A master of Ciceronian rhetoric at a young age, Sidney, she said, wrote his “Apology for Poetry” as a mere teenager.
I barely knew my alphabet as a teenager.
That literature class was a humbling reminder that, although I’ve been studying English for a couple decades now, my command of the language is still lacking. My essay writing is no exception. Over the years, however, I did have some phenomenal teachers who helped me learn to write (mostly) coherently.
The first was a middle school teacher whose class was a daily inquisition. Every day for two years, she would make us read from our thick, hardbound “orange Bibles,” quizzing us mercilessly on clauses, phrases, punctuation, gerunds, pronoun-antecedent agreement, and obscure principles from the nethermost verses of grammatical scripture.
Looking back, those two years were boiled asparagus: Nauseating. But nonetheless good for me.
Actually, that tried-in-the-furnace foundation, literarily speaking, was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Since middle school, I’ve never suffered a serious grammar crisis.
Writing is more than grammar, however, and I’m not sure anything could have prepared me for Mrs. Alir’s (not her real name) class in high school. On the first day of class, Mrs. Alir mentioned that her favorite word in the English language was “ephemeral.” I wondered at first if she was trying to intimidate us. After all, she was an English teacher, not a guidance counselor. She wasn’t paid to care about our self esteem. But she did care about our writing.
Writing was Mrs. Alir’s passion. She wrote well, and she wanted her students to write well, and she was notorious for making corrections as copious as the essay itself. A typical paper, when returned, usually had something like this written on the first page:
72 C-
1:20
“Uh, Mrs. Alir, I understand this first line loud and clear, but what does the 1:20 stand for?”
“That’s how much time I spent grading your essay. One hour twenty minutes.”
After so many years of teaching, she found that red—the color of apples, stop signs, and Denmark—had a menacing effect on students, so she had switched to green. Given the psychological phenomenon of free association, that green, believe me, can be just as menacing as any red.
Many parents were never overly fond of Mrs. Alir. After all, their children had received A-triple-pluses in middle school English, so why should they struggle in high school?
A quick glance over their children’s green-slaughtered essays tended to answer most of their questions.
Mrs. Alir was also honest in her feedback. I remember one of he last pieces I ever wrote in high school—I had Mrs. Alir for three out of my four high school years—was handed back to me without a grade.
“To be honest, Michael, I don’t like it.”
“You don’t? Why? My analysis of a Jungian teleological cosmos is ingenious!”
“Your ideas aren’t properly supported. You can try to salvage it if you’d like, but if I were you, I’d scrap the essay and take a different direction.”
I scrapped the essay. I started over. I scored well on the revision.
That experience was another defining moment my essay writing. Rather than trying to bucket water out of an iceberged Titanic, it’s far better, I learned, to swallow my pride, hop in a lifeboat and start over. I’m no Phillip Sidney, but I can recognize a sinking ship when I see one.
At least in my own writing.
I barely knew my alphabet as a teenager.
That literature class was a humbling reminder that, although I’ve been studying English for a couple decades now, my command of the language is still lacking. My essay writing is no exception. Over the years, however, I did have some phenomenal teachers who helped me learn to write (mostly) coherently.
The first was a middle school teacher whose class was a daily inquisition. Every day for two years, she would make us read from our thick, hardbound “orange Bibles,” quizzing us mercilessly on clauses, phrases, punctuation, gerunds, pronoun-antecedent agreement, and obscure principles from the nethermost verses of grammatical scripture.
Looking back, those two years were boiled asparagus: Nauseating. But nonetheless good for me.
Actually, that tried-in-the-furnace foundation, literarily speaking, was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Since middle school, I’ve never suffered a serious grammar crisis.
Writing is more than grammar, however, and I’m not sure anything could have prepared me for Mrs. Alir’s (not her real name) class in high school. On the first day of class, Mrs. Alir mentioned that her favorite word in the English language was “ephemeral.” I wondered at first if she was trying to intimidate us. After all, she was an English teacher, not a guidance counselor. She wasn’t paid to care about our self esteem. But she did care about our writing.
Writing was Mrs. Alir’s passion. She wrote well, and she wanted her students to write well, and she was notorious for making corrections as copious as the essay itself. A typical paper, when returned, usually had something like this written on the first page:
72 C-
1:20
“Uh, Mrs. Alir, I understand this first line loud and clear, but what does the 1:20 stand for?”
“That’s how much time I spent grading your essay. One hour twenty minutes.”
After so many years of teaching, she found that red—the color of apples, stop signs, and Denmark—had a menacing effect on students, so she had switched to green. Given the psychological phenomenon of free association, that green, believe me, can be just as menacing as any red.
Many parents were never overly fond of Mrs. Alir. After all, their children had received A-triple-pluses in middle school English, so why should they struggle in high school?
A quick glance over their children’s green-slaughtered essays tended to answer most of their questions.
Mrs. Alir was also honest in her feedback. I remember one of he last pieces I ever wrote in high school—I had Mrs. Alir for three out of my four high school years—was handed back to me without a grade.
“To be honest, Michael, I don’t like it.”
“You don’t? Why? My analysis of a Jungian teleological cosmos is ingenious!”
“Your ideas aren’t properly supported. You can try to salvage it if you’d like, but if I were you, I’d scrap the essay and take a different direction.”
I scrapped the essay. I started over. I scored well on the revision.
That experience was another defining moment my essay writing. Rather than trying to bucket water out of an iceberged Titanic, it’s far better, I learned, to swallow my pride, hop in a lifeboat and start over. I’m no Phillip Sidney, but I can recognize a sinking ship when I see one.
At least in my own writing.
posted by Michael Madson at 3:27 PM
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