- I had lunch with two former students yesterday, a happy reunion. One of them was the parent of the other. They were both adults in one of my writing classes, in different years. We had a jolly, wandering reunion conversation. The younger one pulled an un-opened Hot Wheels package out of his pocket and handed it to me. He said, This is a reminder of one of my favorite moments from your class. (That would have been about a dozen years ago.)#
- Inside the see-through plastic, a 1958 Edsel. Maybe an inch wide, three inches long. Black body, red roof, swooping silvery side trim, big old over-the-top Edsel front chrome bumper and grill. He said, There was this sentence you asked us to think about in class that I remember to this day.#
- (His mother said, He went to great lengths to find and then hold onto that for you.)#
- I was pretty sure I knew the sentence. I was asking people to pay attention to sentence types so they could incorporate them into their writing, at first on purpose but then eventually as part of their natural expression. A two-part balanced sentence, like the one JFK spoke in 1961: Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.#
- I said to the class, Go home and write a few of these. I think there was a little bit of puzzlement, not sure. So I said, It's not difficult. And I made up an example.#
- I said, You are the Edsel of my heart, the toaster pastry of my dreams.#
- That got a nice big laugh, but one graduate student said, You made that up ahead. No way you ad-libbed that.#
- I was just a little ticked off by that -- being accused of pretending to be able to compose a certain kind of sentence. Give me a break. But I liked the wacky sentence I had ad-libbed and made a point of remembering it. I didn't have to work to remember the accusation, essentially trivial though it was.#
- But in our fields, we get things down, they become second nature, even though to outsiders or beginners they look peculiar or difficult or mysterious. Maybe even magical or impossible.#
- So one student remembered the sentence for many years -- you never know what one person will remember from your work. That's a given. What good (or not so good) influence have we had? We won't entirely know.#
- PS. Why compose the occasional balanced sentence? Because they are catchy and easy to remember. Three-parters can be good too: I came, I saw, I conquered. It's even pithier in Latin: Veni, Vidi, Vici.#
- I had lunch with two former students yesterday, a happy reunion. One of them was the parent of the other. They were both adults in one of my writing classes, in different years. We had a jolly, wandering reunion conversation. The younger one pulled an un-opened Hot Wheels package out of his pocket and handed it to me. He said, This is a reminder of one of my favorite moments from your class. (That would have been about a dozen years ago.)#
- Inside the see-through plastic, a 1958 Edsel. Maybe an inch wide, three inches long. Black body, red roof, swooping silvery side trim, big old over-the-top Edsel front chrome bumper and grill. He said, There was this sentence you asked us to think about in class that I remember to this day.#
- (His mother said, He went to great lengths to find and then hold onto that for you.)#
- I was pretty sure I knew the sentence. I was asking people to pay attention to sentence types so they could incorporate them into their writing, at first on purpose but then eventually as part of their natural expression. A two-part balanced sentence, like the one JFK spoke in 1961: Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.#
- I said to the class, Go home and write a few of these. I think there was a little bit of puzzlement, not sure. So I said, It's not difficult. And I made up an example.#
- I said, You are the Edsel of my heart, the toaster pastry of my dreams.#
- That got a nice big laugh, but one graduate student said, You made that up ahead. No way you ad-libbed that.#
- I was just a little ticked off by that -- being accused of pretending to be able to compose a certain kind of sentence. Give me a break. But I liked the wacky sentence I had ad-libbed and made a point of remembering it. I didn't have to work to remember the accusation, essentially trivial though it was.#
- But in our fields, we get things down, they become second nature, even though to outsiders or beginners they look peculiar or difficult or mysterious. Maybe even magical or impossible.#
- So one student remembered the sentence for many years -- you never know what one person will remember from your work. That's a given. What good (or not so good) influence have we had? We won't entirely know.#
- PS. Why compose the occasional balanced sentence? Because they are catchy and easy to remember. Three-parters can be good too: I came, I saw, I conquered. It's even pithier in Latin: Veni, Vidi, Vici.#