Even before I taught interpersonal communication online, I taught it as a course with lots of student writing. "Back in the day," I had them write personal journals, with four entries per week or chapter of the textbook. Now, of course, my primary relationship with them is textual, except for the two skill focused phone calls. And even though they are often deep thinkers who write with insight and intelligence about the ways of human interaction, they rarely write well. Their hearts and minds are capable; their sentence construction not so much. But for my class there is no economic liability to bad writing, only to bad thinking.
Yet the bad writing is still one of the reasons I am retiring early. Struggling through reversed words, dropped antecedents, and sentence structures borrowed from bad romance tires me out more than it once did.
(If you want to know more about bad sentences, watching this freaking cool video from Iolani Prep School English teachers and students.) I remember my first year of teaching, when COCC had a ski team, I had a skiing Scandinavian in one of my interpersonal classes. Her writing challenged my understanding because both the sentence structure and the spelling were more Swedish than English. Nevertheless, by the end of the quarter I had no difficulty reading her writing while my own started to have verbs in odd places. And so it is with my native English speakers. My own style is influenced by whatever is coming in through my eyes or ears.
"I guess I'm experiencing the anxiety of influence," she said bloomingly.
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