Writing

English was my best subject at school. It was my only Honors class for several years; I dropped it after I had a horrible teacher in a class full of uptight snobs. Anyway, I've always been particularly good at grammar, spelling, and punctuation; better than anyone else I know (including all my former teachers). I try to let it show on the site, but poetic license or haste sometimes gets in the way. If we've ever exchanged e-mails or IMs, though, you know how pedantic I am about grammar. I capitalize and punctuate on instant messenger, and my e-mail response time is frequently delayed by excessive editing. I treat e-mails much like stories for this website; I'm constantly searching for the perfect word or checking usage or syntax rules.

I keep Webster's dictionary and Roget's thesaurus near my computer, and I regularly Google articles pertaining to linguistics. It should come as no surprise that Noam Chomsky is a hero of mine. Unlike many fans of his (such as Kirston), however, I'm the only person I know who thinks of him first for his work with linguistics and then for his political work.

Also not surprising is that I took a course on English grammar in college. What might be surprising is that I got a C in it. The class had very little to do with actual grammar; it focussed almost entirely on sentence diagramming. Sentence diagramming! My sixth grade English teacher assured us that learning how to diagram sentences was the one thing we would never ever need to know unless we decided to teach English, and my college grammar professor exemplified that. I wiled away most of my time in his class writing my story "The Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus." That led to the sequel, "The Grammarosaurus"; I do not doubt that there will more Kinky People stories featuring linguistic monsters.

My love of words goes back more than twenty years, before I learned to read. My dad, following the advice of some book on child psychiatry, wrote a list of all the words he'd heard my three-year-old self use. The list turned out to be three times longer than average. I learned to read a year later and was already delving into classics by the time I hit elementary school. I continued this trend throughout school, favoring classics and some science fiction. but disdaining magazines and books targeting young audiences. Even today, I'm a notorious literary snob. I look down on people who read Stephen King, chick lit, etc. I hate the term "graphic novels" and waste a lot of time mocking embarrassingly bad fan fiction on the Internet. I frequently find typos in books, articles, or the text of newscasts; it annoys the shit out of me.

All this snobbery isn't for nothing. My way with words has elicited much comment and even, to my flattered shock, at least one comparison to Bob Dylan. I thought that was a bit much, especially after some of the rubbish I've written, but I obviously didn't mind. Still, it's a distracting talent. Where most people have regular conversations, I don't just hear their words; I hear their speech as "misused that word . . . dangling modifier . . . confused 'that' and 'which' . . ." It detracts from the message. I tend not to correct people (except sometimes my dad, and mostly only with "good" and "well" because that's a particular pet peeve); it's annoying to others to be corrected by a know-it-all.

Some people don't mind being corrected; throughout school, friends asked me to edit their English papers for them. I edited an ex's thesis in college; my proofreading was mostly thankless. He actually threw it across the room at one point. The predictably disastrous results of that episode resulted in him being a bit more grateful in the future. Anyway, in high school, a few people even offered me money to read their assigned books for them, but I refused. I had enough work of my own, plus they wouldn't learn anything by cheating. I was still a kind of surrogate tutor for some of my classmates, helping them interpret the assignments or suggesting word choices. It didn't occur to me how badly some of them needed help until relatively recently. I found some student essays online and was shocked at how incredibly bad they were. I thought most of the papers I handed in were mediocre since my best writing goes on this site, but the essays I found on the Internet were truly terrible. It's a damn good thing I'm not an English teacher; all my students would flunk if they handed in papers that awful.

Should I ever go back to school, it would be for a career change. Right now I'm happy with film and theatre, but I might someday decide I want a steadier line of work, or at least less physically demanding. If that were to happen, provided they accepted me, I would undoubtedly get a Master's in English and either teach (ugh) or become an editor or proofreader as everyone has advised me for years. In the meantime, I present to you this section of the site. Consider it a more casual, conversational local variant of Strunk and White, though I won't pretend to possess that level of expertise. I'll self-consciously try to keep the grammar in this section as good as possible, but no promises.