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It’s that time of year again: Graduation Day. At least, it’s graduation for my students, and my last graduation as a full-time teacher. Apparently, the graduating class is so large, and seats are so limited, the admin was encouraging teachers not to attend, but I’d like to be there, so I’m going.
Our graduation ceremony is blessedly short on speechifying. The honor graduate (“third in class”), salutatorian, and valedictorian each give a very brief speech, and there are some general platitudes from the headmaster. They announce a couple of teaching awards, and the kids process across the stage with little video montages they put together. If it weren’t for those videos, it would be lightning quick; as it is, it’s still pretty fast.
Of course, every year I roleplay the alternative: what if there were more speechifying, and I was asked to deliver the keynote address? Well, here’s another round of dubious graduation wisdom from yours portly:
Write Every Day
Most of you will not pursue writing as a career—nor should you, as it’s an oversaturated market that not only competes against real people, but now robots, too. But all of you should write something—anything—everyday. Most of you will through your work; even police officers have to write up fairly descriptive reports of arrests, for example.
Indeed, writing is inescapable. The problem is that very few people do it well, with any degree of competency. The only way to do it well it to practice doing it well. When you send a text message, for example, don’t (as a rule) just type, “k” in response to a message; instead, reply in at least a clear, complete sentence: subject, verb, predicate/direct object. “Okay, that sounds great”; “I will see you at the theater at 6 PM.”
And, yes, use punctuation, especially periods. Look, no one really knows how to use commas; just plop them in whenever it feels like there should be a pause for a breathe. Don’t do that thing that some people do where they end a sentence with an entire string of “…………..” or “,,,,,,,,,,,”—it doesn’t make any sense and it makes you look stupid. It is also really, really annoying.
But I digress. Even if you don’t nail all the grammatical rules, try to write in a way that is clear and precise. Yes, some of us are wordy, verbose writers, addicted to parenthetical asides and em dashes—which are now apparently taboo because AI uses them (don’t let the robots take good things from you)—but you have to learn to walk before you can ascend into a cloud of subjunctive clauses.
Of course, in order you write well, you must…
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