Don't Panic

I used to start a version of a writing class I taught for managers at my firm by starting with what I thought was a really funny joke. After the title slide of my PowerPoint presentation (I know that my dependence on PowerPoint is one of many bad habits I should kick, but they don’t make patches for this one) I would move on to a slide labeled “Writing for Managers Agenda” and slowly reveal these bulleted points:

• Diagramming sentences
• Examining the differences between analogy and metaphor
• What is the subjunctive tense anyway?

I always had to stop after the third bullet because it just seemed too cruel. I could see the blood draining from the faces of my friends and coworkers as their worst fears about attending a writing class appeared to come true. All I had to do to turn these professionals into squirming junior high kids was threaten them with rules for writing. After this happened the first couple of times I took the joke out of my presentation; I didn’t want to come across as a sadist.

But I eventually put it back in once I realized that there was a reason I had put it there in the first place. And it wasn’t all about having a joke to open with. The truth is that when you tell someone that they are going to attend a writing class the first thing they think is that you are going to ask them to memorize arcane rules and grammatical terms. So I started opening later versions of the class by acknowledging that most people probably weren’t thrilled to be attending a class about writing. By warning them about my “joke” slide in advance, I was able to reassure them that these were not the kinds of writing topics we were primarily concerned with. In retrospect, maybe I should have just begun with a slide displaying the words “Don’t Panic,” which were famously written in large friendly letters on the cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and is still the best piece of all-purpose advice I know. Because while the rules of English grammar are important, they certainly aren’t all there is to know about writing well.