I never gave much thought to writing for most of my life, despite my BA in English and a decent reputation as a technology consultant who could write--unlike most in that line of work. I read (and still read) incessantly, but I didn’t care about writing quality, which had to reach John Grisham levels of execrable before I noticed. I read for the writer’s ideas, not the style. I assumed that writers wrote because they wanted to tell a story.

In my early 20s, I remember reading a Joe Haldeman essay on a writer’s desire. Most writers, he said, strive like mad to write maybe one or two perfect sentences on most days, that they prayed for the possibility that they might write a perfect short story, or maybe become the third person to write a perfect novella (in Joe’s opinion, “Heart of Darkness” and maybe “Flowers for Algernon” were the other two.) No one, said Joe, had ever written the perfect novel. This passionately expressed conviction about writing powerful, quality prose made no sense to me at all.

At that time in my life, writing was nothing more than the opposite of reading--like talking, just output to reading’s input. I have always had exceptionally strong verbal skills--I’ve read 1000 wpm as long as I can remember and my vocabulary at eight was more extensive than many college graduates. I analyze literature effortlessly--English classes provided me with all of my As in both high school and college. But while I vacuumed up words for input, I had no particular interest in written output. For me, writing was a form of mind dump--one of two ways to get my ideas out and much more work than talking. Since my ideas are, for the most part, extremely interesting, none of my English professors ever objected to the prose I used to described them. At least, they never mentioned it. Not that I confused their omission with confirmation of my great writing talent, because hey, writing. Who cared?

And yet, for all my obliviousness to writing quality, I had the vague sense that I was missing something. I would always demur when anyone suggested that I explore writing as a career--odd, given my ease and fluency in written expression, but I knew that writing itself didn’t hold any interest for me.

Once I finished college, I got lucky and discovered that contrary to popular belief, analyzing literature was a marketable talent--provided that the literature in question was a computer application. Significantly, I didn’t see much difference between computer applications and literature, when it came to analysis. The expression wasn’t what appealed to me--it was the deconstruction, the search for coherence and meaning. Applications, poetry, James Joyce, whatever. My terrific verbal skills served me very well in tech. I spent fifteen years as an independent consultant.

I might never have understood the larger context of written expression had it not been for a pivotal event in my life, which occurred ten years ago when I first discovered online discussion forums. Not to be confused with either chat rooms or blogs, discussion forums are a many-to-many conversations on any subject you can imagine. I have founded two forums since 1997, and currently run one that helped pay the bills through my first stint of grad school. But more than that, being online expanded both my intake and output of information so dramatically that it’s difficult to remember my life before that time. Had I not found the online world, I wouldn’t have gone to grad school, and had I not gone to grad school, I would never have become a teacher. And, in an entirely separate chain of events, had I not gone online I would have never discovered myself as a writer.

Online discourse itself didn’t alter my perception of writing, as substance (ideas) takes at least equal placed with style. However, it did start my association with a number of people who took writing more seriously than I did, who I never would have met in my life as a tech consultant. Not only was I able to interact with these people, I was able to work with them--often without ever meeting them.

Thus it happened that a good friend, who lived on the other side of the country and who I never would have met in an unwired world, started a humorous 527 fund-raising entity for the 2004 election and needed a website. That friend, a lawyer who knew nothing more about HTML than how to spell it (“H-T-M-L”), would never have known anyone capable of building a website were it not for the online world. But in that online world, I was around to create and write that site.

I was initially nervous. As my friend is a passionate writer who knows exactly what Joe Haldeman was talking about, I knew the site content had to be sharply written--and I knew that I didn’t really know what that meant. Fortunately, the site also had to be funny, and weird as this may sound, “funny” is something I talk--even when the output is written. I’ve always been funny, and care tremendously about timing, words, and organization of humor--but when I think humor, it is spoken, not written.

Thus, while I wasn’t sure I could write to my friend’s standard, I knew I could make it funny. And I did. That site got enormous media and public attention, and was ultimately selected by the Library of Congress for its Online Election Archive. While I had originally thought I’d just create the site and be done with it, I ultimately needed to update it frequently. For the first time ever I wanted my writing, as opposed to my ideas, to be worthy of the scrutiny it was receiving. Creating that site and keeping it fresh for the six weeks before the election caused me to really think about writing for the first time.

I had already started my transition from tech to teaching test prep. My experience with the website, coupled with the SAT’s addition of an essay, led to my tiptoeing into teaching composition, both as a separate class and as a component of SAT test prep. Realizing that I had a limited knowledge of composition as something beyond ideas, I made a trip to Barnes and Noble and found a fantastic book that not only helped me transform my own writing, but my teaching of the written word as well.

I call it the Oops Book because that’s how I find it on Amazon (actual title: A Grammar Book for You and I (Oops, Me): All the Grammar You Need to Succeed in Life, by C. Edward Good). The Oops Book goes well beyond grammar, however, and fundamental writing style considerations that are so sane and sensible that I adopted them all instantly. Thanks to the Oops book and my website partner, who patiently edited out my excesses until I figured out how to do it myself, I have become a much better writer.

Learning how to think as a writer had an extraordinary impact on my teaching. The most important change was internal--by realizing the blind spot I’d had about writing, I learned how to think of my students as writers. Once I realized that I had such a strong preference for literacy input over output, I naturally realized that there must be many people with reversed preferences. Sure enough, I run into students all the time who don’t really enjoy reading and see no purpose to analyzing literature--and their writing just crackles with energy. (These students are almost always boys.) If vivid, creative writers don’t like to read, their English class grades will profoundly misrepresent their ability--and often, they’ll grow up thinking of themselves as “lousy at English”. I have told many parents that their sons have outstanding writing skills and advised them to demand their schools to decouple literature and writing. Until that point, they should make sure that their sons know of their talent and have the space to develop it.

I can also recognize students that have my own priorities--excellent verbal input skills, but indifferent output. I have been able to help a lot of these students “tighten up” their writing by letting them know that good grammar and complete sentences don’t have a whole lot to do with quality of expression. I believe I’ve saved a number of good students from a bad first year in college composition by a few brief talks.

I began this biography as part of an assignment to describe my greatest literacy triumph. Originally, I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what to write about, simply because my lifelong ease with literacy input is still paramount and how can I take credit for reading at the age of 3? After thinking it over, however, I realized that my relatively recent insight into the “output” side of literacy counts as my greatest success. While my writing has improved significantly, the impact on my teaching has been tremendous. I can’t imagine that I would be as effective a teacher had I not finally understood that writing really is more than a mind dump.

I haven’t changed, fundamentally. Ideas are still more important than style; I still don’t often notice bad writing (although Grisham finally has some company on my Bad Writers bench). I’ll never be much of a creative writer, and while I enjoy writing the occasional story of my life, I am entirely uninterested in writing fiction. I enjoy writing personal narratives, but they’re for illustration, not explanation (which is why this “autobiography” is an essay, not a story.) So I’m certainly not a well-rounded writer, as writers go. But like most people, I value the accomplishments I worked for more than the ones that show up at birth. I can take no credit for my zippy reading or my awesome vocabulary. But even if my writing isn’t nearly as impressive as a skill, I earned whatever skill I have.