I accredit my love of writing to the lazy, careless, too-cool, math-loving, 7, 9, and 12-year-olds I grew up with in the public school system; all who inflated my “writer's” confidence. Despite this love, I -- a seemingly average college student -- am arguably believed to be incapable of producing adequate writing. The pervasive belief that college students have poor writing skills has been expressed far and wide from Robert C. Baden’s 1970's article “College Freshmen Can’t Write” to more recent psychology journals claiming the skill is rapidly deteriorating. Many of these scholars blame the English teachers responsible for equipping today’s youth with writing skills, whether because they neglect to update their curriculum, or simply do not possess enough of a passion to motivate students. And yet, I feel as though the meticulous educators who once analyzed my every written word are to thank for my go-to pastime. I love writing, and I am good at it. And I believe the individuals perpetually roaming the high school halls are to thank.

I was raised under false pretenses. I was buttered up by the smiley, bob-cut, rosy-cheeked women who rule elementary English class. Worst of all, my trust was broken by my grandmotherly confidants as they spread the rumors down the middle school hallways: “We heard you are a lovely writer!” my sixth grade teacher spit in my face the moment I walked into the classroom.

I have always had a passion for writing (or so says my mother, who recounts the short story prose I presented to her at the age of 8) and I have always been good at it. Early on in my formal English class career, I was praised and pampered for my “astounding” writing abilities. For years, my short papers were doused in “Fantastic!” and “Beautiful!” and “Superb!,” any studious seventh graders’ dream. Unfortunately, this façade of glorification continued into my freshman year of high school, where the cheerful, down-to-earth Mrs. Caine -- who seemed so out of place that she was often mistaken as an overly concerned student’s mother -- took over reign. “What beautiful diction, Kara!” she had written atop a tediously constructed summary of "Great Expectations." At the time, I had voraciously welcomed the perfect paper back, only now realizing the repercussions of such an act.

Shortly into my sophomore year, I realized that my "Flawless!" English grades and increasingly enthusiastic feedback resulted not from my prodigious abilities, but from the fact that my less-than-capable peers had set the bar abnormally low. How difficult was it to write "Stupendous!"-ly when Michael couldn’t spell stupendous and Laura refused to take the time for even the simplest of assignments? My evident enthusiasm and more or less correct convention set me far above the drooling, sleeping, sulking students. This realization hurled at me in the crescent-moon-shaped letter on my first writing assignment in Ms. O’Leary’s class. How brave it was of Mrs. Caine to dupe me like all prior, who imprudently deemed themselves capable educators.

Ms. O’Leary (whose visible body parts consisted of bright ink and whose dark hair donned a violet streak) was well known throughout the school for her mere obsession with correct grammar. “Poor construction,” “comma splice,” “punctuation error,” error, error. I had never fathomed such anomalies could appear atop my paper, and yet, there they were. I no longer loved writing and I was not good at it. Or so my then teacher told me through cruel "Inadequate!" and "Awk!" comments. Error, error, error. “College students can’t write:” If I had had to analyze such a claim at the conclusion of my sophomore year, I would have said it is because someone in this condemned academic world granted Ms. Susan O’Leary a bachelor’s degree.

Although Ms. O’Leary had an obvious interest in multicolored ink, she failed to match up to her successor: Mrs. Scott, infamous for her obsessive use of a bright purple pen to edit her student’s work. So, for more useful an image to depict my junior year English experience, envision the color purple. Or perhaps one single phrase: “passive voice”. Mrs. Scott was fanatical about both. She gritted and ground over each and every, vague and obscure, irrelevant and relative, is-this-really-a-rule ‘rule’ imaginable, circling any “so,” “he,” “she,” and “and” as a facet of her made-up system. Here, what remained of my free flowing, once creative mind vanished. My vision was blurred by the dark lavender smeared across our daily -- yes, daily -- writing assignments. Error upon error and quivering hands timidly reaching for folded over (the elementary embodiment of failure) rubrics filled the classroom, sentenced to yet another scolding from the woman bearing an uncanny resemblance to Lord Farquaad (according to much of the senior class). With one last chore before freedom -- the fearful end-of-the-year research paper, no less -- I had molded into the restless-always-on-duty-night-shift grammar “nazi” we all think to be a literary cliché. Mrs. Scott loved it. So, needless to say, I thought I had finally encompassed her ideal sleep-deprived seraph when I received the fatal blow. Fooled into believing my love for writing had recovered, I decided to sign up for AP English the following year. Unfortunately, doing so required hand-written approval from my current teacher: “I would not feel comfortable setting one of my students up for failure,” she said. I responded with a requested override.

Now, in my final attempt to recover from the brutal assault that is high school English class, I found myself under Mr. Ian Walker’s direction. Though my peers gushed over Mr. Walker’s 30-year-old good looks and charming slight-accent, I was intrigued by his teaching tactics. His “negative” commentary delved no further than “rephrase” and his harshest feedback began with “perhaps try…” or “consider…” or “what if you instead…” There was little to no grading system put in place, as his indications ranged from a check mark to a double check mark. We wrote about whatever we wanted to, however we wanted to. Eager to regain my literary competence, I was over enthusiastic and, evidently, unprepared. I became aware of my now ill-equipped skills during our first peer edit or, what I now refer to as “The Stephan McMahon Incident.” Following the class’s loose guidelines, shy, soccer-playing Stephan McMahon poorly and dryly constructed a narrative about a lacrosse player winning the championship game, an all-too-common tale among the could-not-care-lessers. Sentence fragments, misspelled words, poor development. The errors beckoned for correction and I exuberantly completed my simple task armed with a bright pink pen. But it was not until I saw the horrified and sheepish look in Stephan McMahon’s eyes as I handed back the folded over, rose-colored rough draft that I knew what I had become: the menacing Ms. O’Leary who grimaced at every improper adverb and the wicked Mrs. Scott who donned an unusually colored pen and cringed at every mention of passive voice. The flawed, grammar-obsessed English system had encompassed me. And so, I drastically altered my ways.

Our next assignment was a stream of consciousness: a form of “situational writing” that Mr. Walker gushed over. With his lenient policies in mind, I had thought it acceptable to abandon all form, sentence structure, punctuation and instead told the story of a young girl rolling and tumbling down a cliff all the while thinking to herself what she were to do upon reaching the bottom and before I knew it, I had completed my entire three-page double spaced assignment in all of three sentences and it was run-on after run-on after run-on. I had been so proud of my work that I thought it a right of passage to have my introduction read aloud to the class as one of the young teacher’s favorite selections. “College students can’t write:” if I had responded to such a claim at the time, I would have been repulsed by the assumption. Of course students can write, and Mr. Walker had proved it. Free-flowing, hardly corrected, situational writing was the answer.

“Your introduction was the only decent part.” I got a C-. Mr. Walker didn’t reward me for my poorly structured essay that lacked so much formality it belonged in a loose-leaf journal, and he did not oblige to my anticipated A++ double check mark grade. Mr. Walker was not the no guideline, free for all experimentalist I had hoped for. Truly, such a teacher and such a class cannot exist in the hope of improving an 18-year-olds’ writing ability. Students need guidelines and deadlines and negative (though constructive) feedback. A “good” writer succeeds by receiving positive criticism, being challenged, and thinking outside of the guidelines -- with which without would be impossible. Mr. Walker was one thing, however: unconventional. His unique and modern approach to English curriculum taught me how to brilliantly construct a concept into a creative, understandable form. Sometimes, you do need the comma.

So, perhaps the theories revolving around college student’s ineptitude remain unproven. Instead of the imagined experimental guru skilled and unskilled writers alike hope for in order to get by with little effort and overthought creativity, perhaps educational systems should adopt a cherub-faced, good looking, Lord Farquaad-esque approach to writing. We all need a Mr. Walker to allow us to write freely and think creatively. But we also need a Ms. O’Leary to teach us correct punctuation, and a Mrs. Scott to obsess over verb-tense agreement, lest subject our reader to misunderstanding due to our illegible run-ons. And, though we do not all wish to admit it, we need a Mrs. Caine and her army of plump do-gooders to cheer us on from the sidelines. Creativity not only comes from within, but from the assurance and encouragement of our peers, companions, and superiors.

This one is to you, Stephan McMahon, in the hope that you, one day, become a good writer.

Baden, Robert C. “College Freshman Can’t Write.” College and Communication. December 1974. Web. 14 February 2015.