Teachers Matter

The modern trend is to emphasize the underappreciated importance of hereditary contributions to IQ and personality to one's success and functionality in life, while downplaying the importance of environmental impacts from parents and teachers. But, as this anecdote illustrates, at the very granular concrete level of things like the particular details of your adult writing style, teachers matter.

Yesterday evening, I spent about an hour editing a brief I'd written for style. I'd done all the research, identified the facts, and organized them into a logical presentation order over the previous few days and it was otherwise ready to file. But, it was hard to follow at points and boring in others, mostly because of several recurring style issues that I have when I am not consciously paying attention to my writing style.

It occurred to me while I was editing it, that about 75% of my bad habits are writing rules and style preferences I was taught in the 5th grade by Mrs. Wozniak (a truly horrible teacher). She was a teacher at Kramer Elementary School, the only public elementary school in the small town where I grew up (Oxford, Ohio).

For example, in 5th grade we learned that combining sentences whenever possible and favoring complex sentence constructions was preferred. That was sophisticated writing, which was better the simple writing. But, I was never taught that these were actually bad writing habits until I had been a practicing attorney for several years and my supervising partners edited my work.

Old habits, especially old habits that you followed since you were a child, for about fourteen years before you realizing that they were bad ones, are hard to break.

As I am in the moment, I write in the way that I was taught growing up which is most natural to me. But, I've learned, over almost a quarter of a century of practicing law, what flaws tend to be present in material that I write this way. However, I can only see them when I stop composing, step away from what I have written so that I can reapproach it "cold" and out of the moment. When I do that I can then examine what I wrote anew with my less intuitive, more formal "editor" hat on. (The former reflects "thinking fast" processes of thinking, the latter reflects "thinking slow" processes of thinking.)

Earlier this week, I was talking colleague about a decade and a half older than I am, who went to an elite private school in Washington D.C. This colleague has an excellent writing style (even if now and then we have disagreements on how to deal with other issues that come up in handling cases for clients). He was describing the writing instruction he remembers receiving at about the same age from his late elementary school teacher. In contrast to what I was taught at that age, his instruction hewed very closely to the style favored in legal writing today, which is exemplified by legal writing guru Bryan Garner.

Alas, my experience, and often much worse atrocities of composition, learned young, are the norm. I learned that very clearly when my wife was an English composition instructor at Mesa State College and shared with me the essays her students produced, and later when she shared with me that papers written by students in a Women's Studies class she was teaching while she was in graduate school. I've also seen it myself, reviewing the written work I my subordinates in the practice of law, and of my clients and the written work of opposing counsel in some of my cases.

Good teachers can improve you for the better for a lifetime. But, bad ones are an albatross around your neck that must be overcome.