I could never understand why my classmates had such trouble with getting good grades in English classes. Most of them attended similar if not superior high schools. The Catholic school students certainly should have had a better grasp of language and composition.
In the long run, my successes were a combination of reading experience and the ability to quickly create mental outlines. I was a voracious reader as a child because that was the only world that did not judge me. At a time when my father was going through his charismatic evangelical midlife crisis and my mother sat on the opposite side tossing me over as a peace offering to keep my sisters off limits, I insulated myself with the written word. I read roughly 800 books between 2nd and 3rd grade. While I could not diagram a sentence for you and could barely remember the difference between a pronoun and an gerund, if asked to put thought to paper then I had no problems.
In retrospect, I suppose it would be interesting to see how differently students would write if they weren't clobbered over the head for simple grammar errors. I used three of tricks to help me through college writing courses. The first was simply cutting out any superfluous language unless the paper required a ridiculously high word count. The second was to avoid, as much as possible, the use of any commas, colons, or semi-colons. The third was to always scan over my paper to make sure that my sentences weren't filled with sudden changes in tense. If you crush a student on small punctuation and grammar errors, don't be surprised when you end up with students who have never been able to fully express themselves, and therefore no longer know how to do so. Grammar is the stack of guidelines we use to help convey clear meaning, but grammar is not meaning itself. Language specifications don't write literature OR code.
What bothers me nowadays is that since I have immersed myself into the culture of the internet, my ability to sit and concentrate and compose thoughtful narrative has become stunted. My messages have become shorter and more direct, and my conversations change topic quickly. I wonder how it bodes for students who have never lived in an internet-free world.
