typewriters

typewriters

Monday, September 16, 2013

Type-O's And Other Cereals

Ironically, a student of mine was giving online feedback to another student and said that she caught "a couple of Type-O's." It's not cereal, kid. It's "typos." It made me laugh, though, and it brought humor to an otherwise rough workweek.

Since then, here are just a few of the many words I've spelled wrong:

Unintelligible
Bulletin
Ingredient
Realistic
Anthropomorphic 
Familiar

And if I were to say that none of these were spelled wrong on the white board in front of my students, I would be lieing lying. I'll admit: while typing out a response to that student's Blackboard post, I went onto Grammar Girl (http://www.quickanddirtytips.com) to check if I was using affect or effect, and to see if I was going to lay down or lie down. Yikes.

And then I had a conversation with my class today about the Inner Critic. You know who this is, I wager. Sometimes we call it Monkey Mind, sometimes we call it Editor Mode, and sometimes we give it a face like our mentor in grad school who is in disbelief that I haven't gotten over this past imperfect verb tense thing. If we're writing non-fiction, we're always wondering what that honestly-portrayed person will say. If we're writing fiction, we wonder what our mentors and students will say. If we're writing articles, we have to make sure we picture the right audience: be funny but not too funny, be friendly but not too friendly, don't use first person, don't ramble on, you wrote too much here, you wrote too little there, and no one cares about how The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is based on Hamlet

Or maybe that's just me. 

Just write the dang thing down. If you allow Inner Critic/Monkey Mind/Editor Mode/Grad School Mentor a say all the time while working to be funny but not too funny and friendly but not too friendly, you've got so many balls in the air that your attention is there instead of on your writing. Surprise of all surprises, I don't know how to spell every single word, and it's not something I'm going to focus on. Sure, it's embarrassing to stand in front of a classroom and have them all think I'm crazy for writing "bulletain" on the board, but whatever. We make mistakes. If you write in the morning, you eat Type-O's for breakfast: that's as predictable as too much caffine caffeine makes your hands shake. 

First drafts suck. Whatever. Give yourself permission. (Just fix these errors in revision.) 

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