Miss Barker Was Wrong
Why my ninth-grade English teacher and I would not agree on much about today’s writing
Okay, that’s not fair. Miss Barker and I would agree on sharp writing and interesting dialogue. She was a tough-as-nails English teacher at Central High School in Iowa. Never married, she was cut from the cloth of lifelong teachers in the 1950s and 1960s. Those dedicated spinsters.
I still have a high school English textbook. I’m sure I picked it up at a library book sale. Yes, the serial comma and I have become one, and Miss Barker and I would agree that participles should be avoided as well as most -ly adverbs in solid writing.
But that’s kind of where our love fest for words ends. She would not have liked my starting that previous sentence with a conjunction. And she wouldn’t like this one either, with maybe too many contractions. She would never let an unclear or undeveloped idea slip by her fierce red pencil.
About those split infinitives, I’m sure she downgraded us on those or when we ended a sentence with a preposition. Or wrote a fragment. Like this.
Language is evolving LOL
The bottom line is that our language is evolving. Writing is evolving. I’ve discussed the devolution into emoji and acronyms in previous posts, LOL. But we can still agree that language needs to convey meaning. To express thoughts clearly. To help us communicate with each other, even though now we are communicating digitally with our thumbs and technology, not with pen and paper.
Lost is the art of the handwritten thank-you note. Gone are the days of the lengthy letter written to fill in family members far away about the news of the day when all that drama is on full display on social media, with photos. Enter the world of digital photos captured in seconds, flashed in seconds, and posted in places they really don’t need to be.
Is AI the new plagiarism?
Don’t even get me started on the dangers of artificial intelligence, the problem with this new form of plagiarism, and why authors think assisted AI is okay to mine for ideas. It is not the new Google search. It is a black hole of bad writing (and we editors can tell when you use it, as I explain in the following post).
Lost is the art of writing. Instead, we are blogging in 1,000-word chunks, X-ing in 280 characters, and despite spellchecking, we are posting misspellings on Facebook. Instead of thinking, we rely on ChatGPT and other AI large language models to write stuff, when we are perfectly capable of putting our words on platforms like Medium, aren’t we?
Miss Barker would have hated it all. (Gotta go, my book report is due.)
Beware the red pencil
When I was editor-in-chief of our high school newspaper (yes, a real newspaper written on Remington Rands and actually typeset by linotype operators in shop class), I know Miss Barker followed my work, and I hope she is smiling somewhere today with her red pencil in hand.
Sandra Wendel is a nonfiction book editor, author of the award-winning book, Cover to Cover: What First-Time Authors Need to Know about Editing, a book award judge, college instructor on book writing, and an avid kayaker.
