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On the Subject of Writing...A Gift For A Friend

You've known for a long time that my greatest wish is to become a journalist someday and later on a famous writer--Anne Frank
What I am about to say is going to shock some of you and probably make some of you use the Google, as the thing by which you will be shocked is somewhat of a lost art. Or science, for that matter, as this thing requires intersecting lines that have meaning, much like a graph of data points should have meaning. But anyway, one of my favorite classes in Junior high school was English class. Oh, you mean because of all the great books and stories you got to read? No. Well then, it must have been because of all the great stories you got to write. Not necessarily. English was my favorite subject because....wait for it.....we got to diagram sentences. The Catholic school way, too. Brutal. Intricate. No room for error. The please, God, don't let me make a mistake and have to use the eraser way of diagramming sentences.

Now, before you throw the proverbial tomato through cyberspace, just missing my left ear, let me explain. My dream was never to be a scientist or a program administrator. My dream was to someday be a real-life Nancy Drew, with the added bonus of writing up each case for publication after I solved the mystery and saved the day. People across the world would know of my clever mind and innate ability to make brilliant deductions from the quickest of observations. And they would learn of my mastery of mysteries at the tip of my own pen. In other words, I thought I was going to be a journalist or writer of sorts. And because I've always held that you should not do things unless you are going to make an honest effort to be good at it, diagramming sentences was just one mechanism that would bring me closer to living my dream.

This wonderful grammatical tool lets you get to know each part of the sentence on an almost intimate level. Properly diagramming a sentence was kind of like going to a family reunion, meeting your distant relatives for the first time, and then being able to make a family tree without making one mistake. Subject and verb are the parents. Participial phrases a string of cousins. And I am not alone in this unhealthy (to some) attraction to drawing zig-zag lines to replace sentences. Gertrude Stein (Rose is a rose is a rose) once wrote:
"I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."
I thought that once I had these tools in place--once I knew how to construct the perfect sentence, build the perfect paragraph, complete the perfect thesis--all that was left to do was let the ideas flow from mind to fingertip to tip of the pen. But, life took a different turn and I did not become a famous muckraking journalist. I have not written my first novel. I fell out of practice for a while. I lost my touch. I would not recognize a dangling participle from an indirect object if they came with name tags. I write as part of my living, sure. But the thing about writing for scientific publication is that it is okay for your grammar to be just a little off. The editorial staff will clean it up, right?

Nah, all I have now are my thoughts. That, and the hope that you, dear reader, will forgive my sentences for being a little less than perfect. Maybe you will get past my imperfect theses. Perhaps you will learn to look the other way when my participle is dangling, or my infinitive is split. And please don't be too harsh, my friends, if I overflow with commas. I love me some commas, afterall. My dream now is that my points will come across and you will see them as I do in my head. That you will follow them without the zig-zag lines. And you will enjoy them without the need for perfection.

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