In eighth grade, I had this horrible English teacher. Or at least I thought she was horrible at the time. Now I am forced to admit that she was the first person to teach me anything useful about writing. I owe a large part of any coherence that I achieve today to her. She was about a million years old, and as such, she forced us into the outmoded practice of diagramming sentences. At the beginning of the year, she issued a challenge: any student who could provide her with a grammatically correct sentence that she was unable to diagram would be given an automatic A for the year. We brought her every long and confusing sentence we could find and she papered the walls with their diagrams.
Well Mrs. Dowling, I think I just wrote the sentence that could at least drive you to drinking if not actually earn me that A. Writing is hard, but writing about math is harder.
(P.S. Sorry about the attitude. I still believe that forced poetry is mean and that grading that poetry is a crime against humanity, but I'm ready to admit that writing is important.)
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