How I Learned to Write
On eccentrics.
I learned to write in large part from one of my high school English teachers, Mr. Browne1, an odd man educated by the nation’s finest schools, by then teaching at a small and obscure prep school in Northern New England. He ate takeout pizza for dinner every night and owned four blue button-down shirts which he wore in permanent rotation. (We could identify them by the large holes in the elbows).
Mr. Browne also taught a Latin elective in which I was perhaps his worst student, but in English I always did well. When I handed in papers analyzing Homer or Wharton, he often circled a malapropism and wrote “wrong word.” This is how I first practiced precision in writing. I wanted an A, not because I was a perfect student, but because I was capable of writing well. I felt sure I would never master Cicero or even sine, cosine, and tangent. Critiquing Melville? That I could do.
Thus I became a slightly better writer. I have tried to improve most days since then. It’s true that writing well is difficult, though in time it becomes a muscle one flexes as opposed to a Sisyphean climb.
I don’t think you can improve as a writer without this kind of feedback. Mr. Browne was an incisive critic because he was an excellent writer. Besides my own father, he is one of the only people I know who could outdo my freakish vocabulary (which for me was more quantity than quality, since I often used words without knowing their meaning). The only time I remember any word flummoxing him was when he was forced to read a guide to “SAT words” with us one year, something he clearly hated.
“Xeric?” he remarked. “I’ve never seen that word before.”
He knew everything else.
As I said, Mr. Browne was odd and rather reclusive outside of teaching. I felt then and now that he was a sort of old-school sexist, a vanishing type of man who came of age in a truly patriarchal academic paradigm. This never bothered me because I didn’t mind if Mr. Browne found me tiresome. I wanted him to teach me how to write, and that he did.
I wonder now how many young people are learning the craft from modern-day Mr. Brownes. Have these eccentric creatures been jettisoned by apps and Youtube videos? I fear most probably have. Strange though Mr. Browne was, he understood the words I used and could repeat them back to me, could scramble for a sheet of paper and a pencil and write down the Latin root. He could tell stories about how a student had only ever vomited in his classroom once, and which cafeteria dish produced this result. He could unsettle his students with morbid humor and condescending stories about “co-eds” first entering the Ivies.
A machine cannot impart these lessons, not really, because a machine cannot challenge a writer or teach a craft. It can only replicate what it cannot understand.
As for Mr. Browne, I think we all would choose him again, disintegrating shirts and all.
Not his real name.
You know, I never thought about AI from this angle before, but thinking about it like this does make me appreciate my writing teachers, many of whom were characters. I went to the same all girls prep school my mother and grandmother went to and had the same writing teacher my mom had. Her name was Miss Newberry and she had more gravitas than anyone in the entire school and regularly made half the class rewrite papers for almost every essay. She also taught Sally Thomas to write, so that is my claim to fame lol.
My freshman and senior English teachers taught me to write well in high school. They were both lefty eccentrics who shouldn’t have been hired to teach in a Catholic school (since they both had VERY anti-Catholic leanings and weren’t afraid to make them known) and both definitely thought my love for my faith was weird, but they respected me because I truly loved to learn and wanted to be a good writer. I’m eternally grateful to both of them.