Seeing Red

As the saying goes…”what goes around comes around”.

I am getting my comeuppance in terms of all the help my mom gave me in paper edits “back in the day”.  She was an English major, therefore when you asked for help…you had better be ready to see ‘blood’.  Red marks on every page…and down the margins.

I have to say though, through her dedication and a smattering of great English teachers, I became a solid writer!  That came in handy as I went to a writing intensive college and then to graduate school where many a paper and iterations of a Thesis were composed.  In essence, this blog can be traced back to those days (minus the red ink; it isn’t advisable on laptops).

Back to my point.  Tonight I was asked by my daughter to help her edit a paper, and after I was done marking it, the abundance of red ink launched me into a spiral of memories.  I can still see the clunky desktop and hear the dot matrix printer run it’s lines (shudder).

My daughter takes to my help much like I did with my mother’s; in the end, she was grateful, but in the middle there was tension and maybe a little overwhelm.  I hope that perhaps there will be a legacy of good writers based on what my mother started.  If not, at least the red pen industry will get a boost every once in a while from this corner of the globe (stimulating the economy, one school paper at a time).

Thanks Mom! (that is what I heard tonight and that is what I say to my dear mother).