By Mark Morelli
I couldn’t diagram a sentence at gunpoint, though who knows what kind of grammarian razzle-dazzle I could drum up with cold steel on my sweating temples.
Till that happens, let’s just say that language is vibrant and alive, slippery and moody, like your rakish dandy of a cousin who changes lifestyles so often that you actually look forward to family reunions.
Diagram sentences and you dismember language, killing it, like the Benjamin Franklin’s “united we stand, divided we fall” cartoon of a chopped up serpent, representing the thirteen colonies.
Language prigs are to A-Sentence-With-Verve what Humor Theory is to A Comedian.
I’ve taught many college writing classes and I now conclude that writing is performance. Reading lackluster writing is like watching someone paint by numbers. So it is a thrill to find a writer reaching beyond the perfunctory. It excites me to be privy to a writer’s self-discovery.
A writer who is not yearning to express is like a suitor not trying to impress.
(Say, I wonder if Jesse Jackson needs a speechwriter.)
Grammar and spelling count, too, but I squash soul just because of a few misspellings. The trade-off there isn’t equal. Anyone trying to punch his way out of the paper bag of conformity deserves a little encouragement.
Sadly though, my finds as a prospector of prose won’t make me rich, or even give me much pocket change. The majority of the essays I get take up pages like white bread fills the stomach. It is not for lack of talent but for lack of effort.
So what happens when a teacher reads tangled and tortured prose? Our minds wander. Just like when you watch a dull movie, you begin to daydream about the movie stars’ private lives -- which are juicier than the roles they are playing.
Once I was grading the paper of a young woman who left clues behind on the paper that were far more intriguing than the perfunctory assignment she scribbled on the pages.nI was marking the paper when something caught my nose. I sniffed page one.
Cigarettes.
The paper had absorbed the odor of smoke.
I continued grading and on page two I leaned close again. The smoke lingered. Now, add perfume.
Page three was pocked with brown specks--tiny drops of coffee -- no, make that amaretto (I got my nose right on it) -- that had splashed upon the page during proofreading. (At least she proofread.) Page four had a sudden flurry of misspelled words (the proofreading bored her)and the final paragraph was just a factory reject of prose: Brazen carelessness, more misspellings, entire words missing, illogic. This was the prose of the hurried, like the messy house of one who had to bolt out on an emergency.
I imagined her emergency: a calling chariot. A voice said, “Hurry, I want to take you in my arms,” and so she dabbed on her perfume (White Linen!) and hurriedly rolled the paper into the printer (the block of print, ridiculous with too big font and too wide margins, leaned Pisa-like.) She smoked nervously, one after the other, and was anxious to get this damned paper done as if she were baking a cake for a mother-in-law she despised.
Had the driver of her chariot stood gently behind her? Prodding her seductively on, nibbling at her nape? Faster, faster, he said, and she complied, clumsily setting down her coffee cup, recklessly typing onto the page, promising herself to correct it later, but later never came.
I’d like to think that she considered her English teacher such an inspiring and fair-minded fellow that he’d give her a chance at extra credit later in the semester.
Right.
If her thoughts came anywhere near thinking about the benevolence of her English teacher, then I’ll eat Tom Green’s socks.
At the moment she rushed to make her chariot ride, my beloved English language was as annoying to her as a telemarketer.
Lest you think I have lost my faith . . . a part of me still thinks that after the embers of passion died down she read to her lover "Leaves of Grass" by candlelight.
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