Las Vegas Weekly

March 27, 2010 · 6 AM

Substitute teaching

By Rick Lax

I’m sitting in the bookstore café. I’m next to a table of teachers, and the teachers are grading papers. The assignment, apparently, was, “Write a persuasive essay backed up by research.”

On of the teachers just marked a student way down for using the word “I.”

“Hi,” I said, “I don’t mean to interrupt,”— obviously I did mean to interrupt; no clue why I said otherwise — “but I’m a professional writer, and I do persuasive essays with research, and I use the word ‘I’ all the time, and nobody seems to mind. And I’m not alone here; more and more legitimate journalists are putting themselves into their works. I mean, at the end of the day, everything relates to the self, so why should the author exclude himself from his writing?”

The teacher said that the kid wasn’t supposed to be substituting his opinion for facts.

Fair enough.

“How did he use the word ‘I’?” I asked.

“He said, ‘In this essay, I plan to argue that…’.”

“So he wasn’t even putting his opinion into the essay,” I pointed out. “He was outlining.”

The teacher frowned and said, “Do you want to grade it?”

“Sure,” I replied.

Gave it a B minus.

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