Adventures in Writing.

Even though it may not be apparent from the hastily concocted literary belches on my Blog, I really can write. It's one of my skills. It's not one of those 'cool' skills like precision spitting or being able to burp the alphabet, but over the years it has served me well. I like writing. I like to read other peoples writing, and I figured I'd like to teach writing too. So, this semester I'm teaching a 3rd year Writing Composition class. My problem, as I discovered last class, is that although I'm confident in my own writing skills, I don't know WHY it's good writing. It just sounds right. After reviewing a few examples of a particular sentence structure in class, some students asked the dreaded question 'why?'. I blurted out an answer that made sense to me, but I wasn't really sure it was true. (I found out later that I hadn't led them astray ~ whew!) Keep in mind, these students are sharp. They've been studying English Grammar since middle school. I don't know if I ever studied grammar. I know that about 1/2 - 2/3 of my Freshman Linguistics class failed a 7th grade English Grammar test circa. 1950, and I know that many of our Korean students have a better grasp of grammatical principles than their native English speaking teachers. It's a little intimidating. Here's hoping I don't make a complete chowder-head of myself in this course!

In other news, my cat is currently trying to crawl inside my printer.