Writing 101

It's early Saturday morning and I'm sitting at my dining room table in SB, sipping gourmet coffee and listening to peaceful instrumentals. The sun is shining through the window and I'm eternally grateful for the burst of blue sky and unbroken rays of sun streaming through my window. Sunshine! I feel *so* much better. It almost looks like a nice day out there, except for the howling winds I occasionally hear, reminding me that, despite the sun, it's really still an Antarctic wasteland out there.

At least it's pretty.

So I'm sitting here, glancing at the mess we created last night. Jack's still sleeping from our heavy exploits, I think I pulled something in my back, and I feel wondrously accomplished.

Yeah, it wasn't THAT kind of night. Get your mind out of the gutter.

I edited Jack's first collegiate paper in 12 years. He kept warning me that it was terrible and it decidedly wasn't terrible...just not structured all that well. To complicate matters, this was a group paper (which I hate and think profs are crazy for assigning) and none of the group members could write much of anything. Seriously, people quoted Wikipedia and About.com as sources. Where I come from, the professor will fall out of her chair, convulsing in ear-splitting laughter before marking "RE-WRITE!" on the paper.

Anyway, we sat at the dining room table for 5 hours (explaining my spasming back) and worked. First, I told Jack to not take anything I say personally. I'm not trying to hurt his feelings in this writing lesson. With that, I taught him Writing 101. Years ago, I created a process for successful writing and shared these tips with anyone with whom I've had to write these last few years. I explained these 11 rules to Jack. I figure, I've spent about $140,000 on my education so far; someone might as well benefit from all those dollars!

After going through The Rules, I asked Jack to puh-lease find some decent sources. He grunted and signed and eventually found noteworthy sources. Over the next 3 hours, we went through the paper, redefining its structure, aligning content, then perfecting grammatical and punctuation errors. It was only a 2000 word paper, but it served as a great place to start. We even created a paradigm for Jack to use on subsequent papers.

I didn't mind helping Jack last night. It proved an interesting and thorough distraction from my stress at the hospital. Without someone helping ME like that when I started at Saint Mary's, I would have been lost in the art of proper paper-writing. However, he *totally* owes me a good back rub!!!