I arrived at Smith College in 1973 feeling reasonably sure about my writing skills. After all, I had been accepted early decision, and had attended private college prep schools. My freshman English class was with Professor Frank Ellis, and he had an interesting approach to his syllabus. Every week, we read one book. By the following week, we were expected to hand in a paper about the book. The first week of class, that paper was to be in the form of a "perfect paragraph," and in the following weeks, students were to work their way up through two paragraphs, a page, two pages, and so forth, to, I think, 10 pages the last week of class. I had no concerns about this, and earnestly sat down to write that first paragraph (by hand! I don't believe I ever owned a typewriter at college!)
It was a horrifying shock, therefore, to get the paper back with a huge red "F" at the top of the page, and covered with red circles, arrows, and expressions of dismay in the margins, punctuated by exclamation points. It took my breath away. I had never, ever gotten an "F" in any class, for any reason. I tried to re-write it, and to do a better job of the second essay, but this time he simply wrote "See Me!" across the top. When I spoke to him, he didn't have any suggestions (and at that time there wasn't a writing lab to turn to) -- essentially he just said, you simply have to write better. And until I wrote a perfect paragraph, I could not go on to a longer paper.
All semester, I was stuck in one-paragraph limbo. I tried over and over. I spoke with my freshman dean; she had to hand me a huge box of tissues because I couldn't stop crying. I was beginning to grasp that a certain lax approach to the teaching of writing had characterized the late 60's and early 70's. Society was falling apart, and we were given permission to express ourselves with not much guidance on how to do it. To this day, I barely know the parts of speech, and I know nothing about sentence structure, or the difference between a dangling participle and a hanging chad. I would later embarrass myself, the only music major in a Chaucer class, when I publicly asked the professor for an English grammar cheat sheet to use in conjunction with the Middle English grammar sheet he had just handed out. That is, I was embarrassed until he asked the assembled English majors if any other "spoii sports" needed this elementary help, and one by one, the entire class raised their hands!
In that first class, I don't think I ever moved beyond one paragraph, and I scraped through with a C-. But the "sound" of good writing would eventually guide my pen as I wrote other English, history, religion and music history papers, and by senior year my writing and self-confidence had improved substantially. What is interesting is that I would go on to be a Time Inc. Letters Correspondent for over a decade, a job which absolutely required "perfect paragraph" writing, and then I went on to teach essay writing at the college level, and publish several articles of my own. Fifteen years ago or so when I went back to Smith for a reunion, I sought out Professor Ellis, who was quite elderly by that time. But he remembered me, and I thanked him, in effect, for being so hard on me. I appreciated that it stemmed from a love of the language, and that he had been trying to help me. To this day, my paragraphs remain "imperfect," and I still don't know anything about English grammar. But I love to write, and can't imagine a day without it.
