edit.. editti...editting...editing!

February 2010

I love all my modern word processing friends. The abc-check, the big book with magnifying glass thesaurus, the googly eyed paperclip that is so much more interested in my work than anyone else. The question mark man. Red squiggly underline that has yet to learn my last name.

Watching my son work on his advanced third grade work takes me back to learning about the dictionary. The dictionary that will always appear in my mind the way it did in third grade, at Sacajawea elementary, divided on the cover as dic-tion-ary. My face book friends from Sacajawea will remember. Then comes the doomed sound of my hateful third grade teacher “look it up in the dictionary.” Line---oh, that’s right. The same line all third graders across the country, across the world say -- “how can I look it up in the dictionary if I don’t know how to spell it?” I was trying to use the word emphasis in previous writings. Infases? Inphaces? infasses? Enfases? Unphases? Did you notice that in the history of the world, no third grade teacher has ever had an answer to that question?