Person A

Yesterday I was talking to my friend, whom I shall dub as Person A for this entry, on AOL Instant Messenger. We almost broke morning talking, with her doing most of the talking, as I edited her essay for grammatical and style errors. While I edited her essay and pretended to listen to her babble on random subjects, seriously, I almost cried.

It's not that she's not intelligent. Or stupid. Or even retarded. She's just a murderer. A murderer of the English language. Throughout her entire essay, she managed to butcher the simplest of words and then continued to disregard the rules of proper grammar. On top of that, I even had her start her own blog so she could strengthen her grammar and vocabulary, yet it yielded some bad results such as:

Spaces after an ellipsis.

Tense changes mid-sentence.

Redundant articles that do nothing but improve word count.

Fragmented AND run-on sentences.

Abuse of capitalization in the wrong places.

Splitting of compound words. ("Masterpiece does not equal master piece.")

I seriously almost cried. For her birthday, I gave her a style book that also doubled as a book on punctuation. It seems that book is doing nothing but gathering dust in a corner of her house, as I am convinced she opened it like twice and then decided she wanted nothing more to do with it. I was willing to ignore her errors, as writing is also a learning process. As the old saying goes: "We learn from our mistakes." ...Or whatever the actual saying is.

I'm proud of her, however. We both come from New York City. I find it safe to say that English isn't one of the more "important" subjects from New York City schools. She desires to become a journalist, which usually condones knowing the rules of grammar (I guess that's why we have editors). I was convinced that her dream would go unfound, and she would end up like the grammar book I gave to her for her birthday. And I say this in the nicest way possible, if possible.

After comparing her essay to her blog, however, I can now see that her grammar wasn't as terrible as I thought it was. From a shocking, thirty plus errors in a two page, double-spaced essay...to a one page blog with only three visible errors, my eyes were opened to the fact that she does have it in her to become a journalist.

Don't get me wrong, I'm convinced that she won't be working for the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. But her voice in the blog is so clear and fresh. You can almost feel her excitement as she goes into detail about what she does. It's like reading a blog, but one of the blogs that make you feel happy inside. It takes work to convey emotions into an assignment. And I believe that if she manages to grasp that concept, she'll find her dream through all the city dust.


Everything above is fictional. If there is any likeness to a real person, it is all coincidental. This is experimental writing.