It Always Seems to Start with the Beginning!

Back when we were in school, most of us were taught that an essay (or almost any writing assignment) should have a beginning, a middle and an end.

I'll be the first to admit that it's a pretty good starting point. However, I have never been all that good at following convention.

In a slightly romantic sort of way, I can trace my roots as an editor to the day my dad told me that many publishers will send you a dollar if you can find and report a typo in one of their books.

Truthfully, I have no idea whether or not this was really true, but it set me down a path — as about a 10-year old — of always looking at the "patterns" of language and particularly written prose.

In case you are wondering, this happened around 1970...

As much as anything, I consider myself a bit of an "accidental" editor and proofreader.

I have always wanted to be been a writer... or so it seems. When I was about seven or eight, my mother bought me several blank exercise books and gave them to me with the hope that I would turn out to be artistic.

Instead of drawings, I soon filled the pages with words — fanciful tales of my teddy bear flying to the moon, and life inside a leaf.

Where many of my young peers wanted to grow up to become fire fighters or astronauts, my dream was to "tell stories!"

Life, however, had other plans for me.

You could say that my first "real" editing gig happened in my freshman year of college. After handing in my first essay assignment for freshman English, the professor pulled me aside and asked my why I was even in his class.

"Uhmmm... because it's required...?" I replied.

He then told me (I should add he was a published author with several books to his credit) that my essay was graduate school dissertation level, and it would be a complete waste of both our time for me to sit through the class. He then suggested that I shouldn't come to class anymore, and he'd give me an "A" if I'd be his teaching assistant and help him both grade papers and mentor struggling classmates during his office hours.

And that, in a nutshell, is how I started spending more time looking at other people's writing than my own.

As I write these words — with 2019 coming to a close — I can say that I have amassed  about forty years of experience in "grading" and "correcting" writing.