"B" Work to my "A"

Grammar B or the "Alternate Style" has been my best friend in my BYU career. I waited a long time to find it and worked hard to develop the relationship.

Skipping back to middle school and high school years, my teachers told me to never start a sentence with a coordinating conjunction, use a contraction in an essay, or use the personal voice. Those were unforgivable taboos that evoked a giant red circle whenever I would forget the "rules." Due to such indoctrination, my writing was dry, but won my GPA bonus points on the secondary level.

At the university level, however, I took Dr. Hickman's American Literature Survey Class, where my precious "A's" were slapped and replaced with the dreaded "B's." It seemed no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't produce "A" level work. Such a frustration! All the years of formatting and convention stunted my idea development, and my dry style likely bored my professor to using his pen to distract himself from my dully expressed ideas.

Later in a 300 level university writing class, my professor introduced me to the "Alternate Style" where my ideas finally had the freedom to exist beyond the lines of convention, a "liberation akin to the women's suffrage amendment" like Mr. Romano said in "Breaking the Rules With Style." Using books such as Writing With Style, I learned that I can start a sentence with a conjunction! And doing so could add flavor to an otherwise boring critique, among other rebellious rhetorical techniques.

I now had my own style, breaking the rules in a calculated, controlled way. As a junior, I took a second class from Dr. Hickman, and my writing had changed! I finally earned those "A's," and it felt amazing to receive that affirmation from my favorite professor, knowing that my writing had transformed to what he would deem an accomplishment. He even suggested that I present my piece in a writer's conference. Never in my life had I been so proud of a paper. Though there had been many papers in between those freshman "B's" and the final "A," I felt like that particular paper took me three years of revising my writing: and I finally succeeded!

Romano quoted Weathers who asked "that the 'ways' of writing be spread before [him so that his education could be] devoted to learning how to use them." That too would have been my request, had I known such ways existed!