Why no one is a bad writer

Now, why would I want to start this post out with the kind of relativistic claptrap that would make English teachers want to tear their own eyeballs out? (And yes, if they are reading this post right now, they are doing that or something similar.)

I say it because it is true, and I observed it over and over as a writing tutor.

To put it simply, everyone writes according to his or her abilities, and no one deliberately sets out to be a bad writer. I observed so many students who would be labeled “bad writers” by their English teachers, but who were perfectly willing to change when the rules were explained to them in relation to their own writing when I tutored them in a one-on-one session. Most were very apologetic about such things as their comma usage and welcomed the chance to learn and practice those skills.

Here's the deal--we are all on a continuum of development, honing our skills. We are born, and we begin communicating by saying “mama.” We first get a pencil in hand, and we start scribbling. We learn how to form and interpret letters and draw scraggly stick figures. We begin putting letters together. Then we begin putting words together into sentences. Every assignment we are given calls forth something more than we ever thought was in us.

We learn to write better by reading writers that are better than us. We learn the turn of dialogue and where to put quotation marks and commas. We notice that sometimes a character’s thoughts are in italics.

We notice what is funny and try to imitate it. We learn about the ridiculous and fanciful. We learn to tell stories, we learn what kind of stories seem boring, and we try to write so as not to bore others.

We learn to argue a point and prove it. We learn to follow written instructions and we discover that there are different ways of interpreting instructions, depending on where a comma is placed.

We discover opinions that we don’t like and try to discredit them, and we learn how to twist word meanings and tangle words up. This causes us to begin guarding our own writing better so that the same is not done to us. We learn to examine our unspoken assumptions. We learn how to put our reasoning in order.

We notice interesting punctuation marks, and we try to figure out how to use them. We notice patterns of usage with dashes, parentheses, semicolons, and colons. We experiment with them and overdo it until we learn to use them sparingly. All along the way, we are corrected and praised and graded, and the more detailed the feedback, the better and faster we can improve.

Instead of calling a person "a bad writer," we should call a person "an unskilled writer." Yeah, yeah, I know I'm debating semantics, but skilled writing requires careful attention to word choice.