Do teachers have no respect for writers?

The Cornishman reports that Mounts Bay Academy has banned red markers. Red ink will be replaced with green to protect the self-esteem of delicate English children. (This is already a common practice in many American schools.)

Vice principal Jennie Hick told The Cornishman: “Switching to the new marking system is certainly not about us going all soft and fuzzy. Students make more progress if it is a dialogue and the new system is designed to help that. A teacher will make two or three positive comments about a student’s homework and point out perhaps one thing that will take them to the next stage. I think it was felt that red ink was a very negative colour.”

Wow. I wonder if my editor understands that I would write so much better if she would use green ink and bracketed every correction with positive comments. Are teachers unaware how devastating it will be for aspiring writers to see their work critiqued for the first time as adults? Besides, do school administrators really believe kids can’t recognize a negative comment if camouflaged in green ink?

Nothing is more shocking to self-esteem than submitting written work to an editor.  Red ink abounds. I have learned more from editors than from classes, workshops, and how-to books. I also feel challenged to do as good of work as I am capable of prior to submittal. I would suggest future authors would benefit from unrestrained critiques presented in red ink.

On the other hand, I do like kind words.

Was Curly from City Slickers right all along?

One thing. Just one thing.

The Telegraph in London reports that “Scientists find secret to writing a best-selling novel.” Boy, was I eager to read that story. What claptrap. It concludes by stating, “Previous work has attempted to gain insights into the ‘secret recipe’ of successful books. But most of these studies were qualitative, based on a dozen books, and focused primarily on high-level content - the personalities of protagonists and antagonists and the plots. Our work examines a considerably larger collection - 800 books - over multiple genres, providing insights into lexical, syntactic, and discourse patterns that characterize the writing styles commonly shared among the successful literature.”

In other words, they counted the number of nouns, conjunctions, and such. Yup, I’m sure that’s the trick—arithmetic. According to these scientists, bestsellers shun action for introspective protagonists.

There used to be an old axiom of computing, GIGO, which meant garbage in, garbage out. Computers are obedient creatures. They do what they are told at the speed of light. If a scientist starts with faulty logic or data, the results smell rank. There is some good news in the study. Since it occurred in England, American tax dollars didn’t fund this particular busy-work.