Writing is hard

Writing for some people is very easy, my husband fits into this category.  He actually would like to write his own novels or even ghost write an autobiography for someone important in the future.  He can sit down and type away for minutes and it results in this almost poetic story.  That was just an email announcing his football pool has started or something else trivial.  It's disgusting really.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoy reading whatever it is he writes, but the ease at which he is able to do it, sickens me.

Writing is easy for some people.  I am not one of those people.  For those of you who are Grammar Police, back off!  I'm trying!  I use spell check and when it yells at me for passive tense, I try my best to fix it.  However, the other day I got so confused between passive voice and past tense that my husband had to edit my last post.  He blathered something about the difference between passive voice and past tense, then he mumbled something about not using conjunctions either.  (Ha!  I used one there, didn't I?) Ugh!  I do what I always do, I asked him for help.  Help means "please rewrite this stupid thing, because the words are blurring together for me?!" 

The truth is, my entire life I have always had help writing papers or reports.  I'm not talking about people who pay someone to write it for them, or they just copy it off the web.  I have never and never will use plagiarism.  I had help from my parents.

In the beginning I would actually put effort and a little hope in a paper I wrote.  Then I would have my parents review it, in order to receive their praise and admiration.  What would be returned to me, would be this paper with so many marks on it, it looked like the ink smeared or someone used it as a tourniquet, if I was lucky enough to get the red pen.  My hopes dashed, I would fix the mistakes and go on my way.  Later, I think it began to be apparent to my parents that there was no hope in my writing skills.

They tried the whole "make an outline, then write from your outline" method.  I just couldn't grasp the whole Introduction, Body and Conclusion part of book reports or research papers.  During college it became blindingly clear that there was no hope for me.  I would submit a paper to my parents for review, then get back an entirely different paper, full of remarks and wording fixes.  It got rather depressing.

Fortunately I chose a science major so, writing papers wasn't a huge deal, because no one else could write well either.  We left that up to the English, History and Journalism majors.

 Fast forward a few years, my daughter is in kindergarten.  She is learning to write sentences and paragraphs.  She does it with such ease and enjoyment, I start to feel happy that she will take after her father.  Then I realize that I'm learning with her.  Yes it took a kindergarten teacher to begin this process.

"Every story needs a great beginning (introduction), you have to get people to be interested in what you are writing.  Then, you need to include sentences about your topic that are descriptive and fun (body), so people will continue to read.  Last, you need to have a great ending (conclusion) so people will know that you are done writing."  The quotation marks are real, my 5 year old daughter said this to me one day during her writing homework.

So here is a salute to my parents and to my husband:  Thank you for passing on your genetics to our daughter, she will be the one who finally teaches me how to write!