Too often there are students who enroll in elective writing classes (or, worse, declare journalism as a major) who have no interest in language. They claim to have an interest in language, but their profound inattention to it suggests that they read rarely and write their papers while drunk.
Last week while I was grading my grammar students' homework, one journalism student, Meaghan, exasperated me. Had she not been awake for all those hours she sat in the front row of our class? Had she not thought about a single word she had heard or read in her nineteen years of life?
Because I couldn't kick her squarely in the butt, I did the next best thing: I pinged a colleague who taught—and failed—her last semester. She agreed that the student doesn't think seriously about language. I sighed, finished grading, and quickly forgot about the exchange.
***
One of our style workshops this week challenged students to consider diction. I typed a passage from The Prince of Tides and, after a few deep breaths, defiled Conroy's carefully constructed prose. I added unnecessary words and phrases, exchanged Conroy's precise nouns and verbs for drivel. (My version used the term "New York-y." No joke.)
In class, I gave students my trainwreck and asked them to work with a partner to make it less awful. Cut words. Replace phrases with exact words. Trade a vague word for a specific one. The students apprehended the paragraph, determined to rectify the injustice.
Smirking, I eavesdropped on my students while they worked. As I passed by Meaghan and her partner, she said, "This just makes me angry. It's so bad."
"Good," I smiled. "Make it better."
After hearing the students' revisions, I read Conroy's original paragraph slowly, letting them savor the richness of the prose.
When I looked up, Meaghan's lips were parted, her sapphire eyes brilliant beneath her freckled brow. "It's like poetry." She said. And she asked me the name of the novel.
I hope she'll think about language as she reads it.
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