“I’m kind of a messy thinker, left to myself,” a fifth-grade teacher from Ohio told me when I visited her classroom and was swept up in her excitement for teaching grammar.

 

I know what a great thing it is to have that punctuation right there where you need it, doing the right thing, and helping your thinking unmess itself. This is the trick I teach my students: writing is a kind of thinking, and it’s the kind of thinking where you can make your thinking almost perfect.
You can pick exactly the right word, you can put exactly the right pause in when you want to have a little space between your words, and you put a colon in here: BOOM! ‘Listen to this,’ the colon says, ‘this is going to explain everything.’ Or you can put that charming semi-colon in there, and say these two ideas are good, good friends; they don’t want to be pushed apart by a full period, though they’re not quite so close cousins as a comma would imply. Oh, it’s fun! And it lets students really think long and hard about their own ideas, and how they really want the words to lay out there and tell their story, in just the right way.

And as I said, my thinking is really kind of messy when I’m stirring up some new ideas, but the pleasure of making all the pieces fit together, of getting everything clear and fully expressed, is just a great joy. I feel it when I stand up there in class and unveil the secrets of the these great little devices, that subtle semi-colon and the careful comma, and of course there’s the mysterious ellipses. . . You know, I get excited just thinking about it.

 

This is the joy of learning, and the love of subject-matter, that the great teacher could not shake even if he or she tried.