Back to the Basics

Have you ever watched the show "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" You know, the game show where adults make fools of themselves by struggling to answer questions fit for elementary school students. It can be rather entertaining, and also very sad at the same time. Do we really forget that much as we age?

Watching the show reminded me of an experience I had in high school. In one of my "honors" English classes, we were given a test to assess our basic knowledge of the english language. The test was simple, and one I would have aced in the fifth grade, which consisted of us giving examples of the eight parts of speech: verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. To my horror, I found that I had forgotten what most of them were. Of course, I failed miserably, but to my surprise, I was not alone. Most of the class also failed. We honors students were obviously not too smart.

I learned a valuable lesson that day, which I've kept with me since: it never hurts to get back to the basics.

This is a lesson that is universal. Everyone can benefit from revisiting the basic principles of what they do, especially writers. As writers, we sometimes tend to fall into habits that can sometime turn bad, like using certain words or terms too often, not varying our sentence structure, or sometimes not varying the structure of our written pieces. We often don't even realize when we have developed bad habits. By revisiting the basics of writing, we can reveal those bad habits and correct them.