I'm back! Steve's birthday weekend was wonderful. He entered his 30s with grace and style and only a minor hangover. Last night, we shifted gears into my birthday celebration, which has been extra-special because it coincides with my gorgeous nephew Nathan's first Colorado visit. He is a two-month old bundle of snuggly joy!
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I've spent a lot of time lately bemoaning the abysmal quality of the average American's writing skills. I've been editing a brief for a lawyer working on a death penalty case in another jurisdiction, and have been frustrated and surprised at her inability to convey her important (and pretty compelling) issues coherently. But even when someone's life isn't on the line, it seems that more and more people are incapable of writing logical, articulate, even COMPLETE sentences.
Recently, I commiserated about this problem with my mother, who is even more of a stickler for good grammar than I am. She's been editing research papers for the CU students in my dad's history class (a freshman course about 1947 as a watershed year in American history), and she tells me the quality of most of these students' writing is appalling. I'm shocked to think that so many students could make it to college as liberal arts majors without learning how to write, but then again, I've got this fifty-year-old lawyer in Wyoming who can't do it. Steve and I were talking about this recently and agreed that high schools need to place far more emphasis on teaching students how to write. If you don’t learn it in high school, you may never do so. Steve’s a good example of how important high school writing training is. Though he's an engineer and hasn’t had to do much serious writing for ages, his twelve years of rigorous Catholic education ingrained spelling, grammar, and other important writing principles into his very being.
But I don't really want to write today about the decline and fall of American prosaity (is that a word? It should be.). Rather, the fact that I'm so worked up over this bad writing that I'm editing has me wondering why I place so much stock in a person's writing ability and style. I've ended relationships over bad writing, at least indirectly. A few years ago, I was dating a sweet-but-utterly-wrong-for-me man whose inability to spell, punctuate, or use proper grammar actually destroyed whatever attraction I originally had for him. My dear friend Lily and I bonded over our respective needs to break up with our boyfriends during an all-night conversation marathon in a Bangkok hotel room. When I told Lily about one of this guy’s particularly egregious (and repeated) spelling mistakes, she instantly understood why I could not continue to date him.
During my brief (but entertaining) foray into online dating, I weeded out potential contacts based on the literacy of their profiles or contact e-mails. I was willing to forgive minor spelling errors and obvious hasty-typing mistakes, but I'm sure I rejected some terrific men because they repeatedly used "it's" as a possessive or spelled definitely with an "a." One man prefaced his e-mail by admitting his dyslexia, which led me to overlook some of his writing errors (though not his lack of personality, poor guy). On the other hand, while some women fall for men with bulging biceps and others swoon for fast cars or hefty wallets, I'm a sucker for a well-turned phrase. Witty, articulate e-mails, snappy literary allusions, and deft word-play would find me eager to explore further contact with a cyber-suitor. More than once, I was disappointed to discover that a man with a smooth keyboard style presented an altogether different "live" persona. I guess I learned that you can't judge a man ENTIRELY by his ability to write, although mostly I discovered that the internet is not my preferred medium for meeting men. I do still wonder if I could make any money by penning “The Elements of Love: Strunk & White’s Guide to Internet Dating Success.”
Of course, some of my favorite people in the world are average writers, and I don't love them any less because of it. But while I have unique relationships with each of my parents for different reasons, my mom and I have a special connection based on our shared grammatical anality. In college, I would call her at all hours of the night and read my papers to her over the phone (hard to imagine, but this was before e-mail and speedy electronic document transfer). No one else has ever edited my work with such care and precision, although some of my FPD colleagues now come close.
My bond with my best friend, Julie, has endured sixteen years and vast separations of time and geography at least partly because of our shared love for words and our support of one another's various writing endeavors. For the past eight months, Jules has been traveling around the world with her husband. As much as I miss her, her absence doesn’t feel quite as painful because she’s been sending me a steady stream of e-mails and postcards filled with her razor-sharp wit and vividly detailed observations. Through our written words, we’ve been able to share both the great adventures and day-to-day minutiae of each other’s lives, and when I read her e-mails, I can almost imagine that she’s telling me the story over a glass of wine at Potager.
And when Steve and I first met, I was a tiny bit concerned that his engineering background would translate into dull, awkward e-mails filled with spelling errors. Imagine my delight upon receiving my first e-mail from him and discovering its contents to be literate, articulate, grammatically solid, properly spelled, and funny!
As the Bee Gees (hey -- I was born in the '70s) once sang, "it's only words/and words are all I have/to take your heart away.
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