Dear Teacher with a Green Pen,
Red means stop. Green means go. She chooses to grade each essay with a green pen because she wants her students to keep writing, not stop.
Yes, commas are sprinkled in at random, and fragments wink in mockery. If she is lucky, he capitalized the first word of the sentence. From there, she can tell things took a nose dive.
She wants to tell him to transition from passive to active voice and work on parallel structure.
If she were Ranella Holley, the JDCC grammar Nazi, she would note he has excessive dangling modifiers, an incoherent thesis, weak description, incorrect tenses, and a greasy peanut butter stain in the left corner of his essay, but she doesn't say any of this.
She knows he has no idea what active voice is and the peanut butter stain is, by far, the most endearing part of his essay besides his clever title in bold, 16 point font at the top. She reads the title three times because she wants to remember it accurately to tell her friends later. "I can't think of a suitable title, but I know it needs to be a long one because I really, really, really need to get to 500 words, and I am sure hoping this one does the trick."
It is true, a red pen could say so much, but a green one could say so much more. A remark in green says, "I see you. This needs some work, but keep going. There's real genius here, and if you aren't too scared to keep writing, you'll find the gold eventually." Red ink paralyzes a kid for life. It says, "Stop. Your life is meaningless, and you aren't fit to grace words on a page."
English teachers are arrogant. The world has noticed. With flared nostrils, they correct innocent family members for improper usage of who versus whom. They reprimand grocery store clerks for using double negatives. They become violently ill over social media mishaps of "they're and their" or "loose and lose."
I have no doubt somewhere in an assisted living facility there is a retired English teacher with gnarled fingers grading a stack of empty napkins while bemoaning her students' lack of subject-verb agreement.
It's not that we mean to be mean. We're simply decades-tired of people not reading our feedback, so we take it out on poor, unsuspecting souls who don't even know what they did wrong.
This is why going green makes sense. Naturally, people want to hear what they did right, not what they did wrong.
Grace changes people for the long haul. I know. I'm a product of it.
With a green pen, a teacher can miraculously detect a microscopic diamond in the heaping spoonful of garbage. She can convince a kid he is the next Ernest Hemingway.
And he can be, if he keeps writing.
In the same way a choppy foreign language can become fluid over daily usage, a student writer can become smoother with practice. I've witnessed the evolution firsthand. It always started with a green pen.
I shudder to think how many Pulitzer Prize winning novelists we've lost because they were sidelined by a lying red pen.
I understand it may not happen overnight, but could we all, at the least, think about going green in this new year?
-CDB