Thunder-ants

It is now two weeks until I begin teaching College Writing, and I am becoming increasingly grateful for my 12th grade English teacher. The voice of Bergan continues to guide my writing, and I can only hope to imitate that voice in my own classroom - however cheap an imitation it might be.

"No THEE-sis . . ."

On a related note, I began my teaching-prep coursework today. Here's a little in-class writing assignment I did based on the prompt, "Describe what it's like when you're writing well."

* * *

I know I'm writing good poetry when I've got the rhyming dictionary open at my side. "Underpants and Thunder-ants. Brilliant!"

I know I'm writing a good essay when I've gone for more than five minutes without the MS Word red squiggly appearing under one of my words.

It doesn't happen very often.

The problem is, I'm a sucker for helpful writing maxims, such as "i" before "e" except after "c." But that doesn't work for words like efficient, or even ceramics. And MS Word doesn't really help matters, either. I spell "efficient" wrong, and it gives me all sorts of terrific suggestions, like "effeminating."

That's not even close. I'm pretty sure it's not even a real word.

But I put it in anyway, because that's what the MS Word talking paper clip tells me to do, and I don't want to get on that guy's bad side. He could totally screw up my carefully spaced margins, just out of spite.

Another way I know I'm writing well is if Blogger uploads my pictures right away. I mean, what's the point of writing something like, "Check out the mustache on that guy!" if there's no accompanying picture of said guy? More often than not, I'll just end up deleting the entire post. Stupid Blogger.

And finally, in the classroom, the quality of my notes is inversely proportional to the number of doodled TIE Fighters in the margin. Just something to keep in mind this week.