Running Laps

You gonna rewrite that shit next time!? Punk.

Why so many high school and freshman college students I meet think they get one shot at writing an "A" paper is beyond me.

Imagine a bunch of high school freshmen walk into the locker room at the start of the football season and the coach says, "OK, guys, get suited up. We're playing Bishop-Gorman(1) in an hour."

These 9th graders may have played PeeWee or street games, but never at the high school level and have had no practice, no play study, nothing. The kids might be excited at first, especially since they didn't have to do any of the grinding conditioning and fundamentals work. They never had to run laps, drop and give the coach 20, or memorize and run plays until they dreamed about them.

So the kids hit the field and get slaughtered and the coach says, "You all suck. You'll never play football. You have no talent, no drive, and no knowledge of what to do out there. Get out of my locker room!"

If your son were dropped into a game with Gorman and the coach didn't put the boy through a rigorous and repetitive training program that drilled him until he was exhausted and inspired to press on, you wouldn't holler at your kid, you'd scream for the coach's head.

Learning how to write well in the academic environment is exactly like getting ready to play the best team in the league. Writing well isn't a matter of talent, it's a matter of preparation. Repetition, conditioning, memorizing the play book and running the plays until you dream about them. Running them until you can spot a botched set of quotation marks in the grocery store. Running them until you can pull your own misplaced modifiers and vague pronoun references and subject-verb disagreements and sideline their asses. Running them until slinging together a 5-paragraph essay is as easy and automatic as driving to class.

(1) Bishop-Gorman, a privately operated Catholic school. In Vegas, B-G is synonymous with boost-your-football-team-with-all the-best-high-school-players-from-the-valley-by-handing-out-scholarships.