mr. morton is the subject of the sentence, and what the predicate says he does.

So this paper I turned in Monday. 6 - 8 pages, single-spaced, 10 point font. On caching. But don't get me started.

Now that we've turned in our own papers, we have to review the papers of others. We fill out these review sheets and go through the paper, reading and correcting, red ink pen in hand.

I haven't edited someone else's paper since high school. My senior english teacher used to make us have "conferences" with our classmates where they read it and made suggestions, corrections, etc. I did not do this. I'm a private girl, and I didn't want other people to read what I wrote, much less make suggestions about it. So that's why I started an online journal, eh?

But other people would ask me to read theirs, or at least a girl that sat next to me did several times. I couldn't stand her. I don't know why she asked me to read her paper, since she had to have known she was low on my list of favorite people. Then again, no one liked her. Maybe I was just closest.

It was painful to read her papers. She thought she was some sort of fabulous writer, and maybe she would have been if she had ever gotten ahold of the run-on sentence concept. She honestly did not understand basic sentence structure. I read the papers, and I made corrections, but not many because it was just pointless. I filled in a couple of commas, fixed a couple of misspellings, and maybe connected a couple of fragments if I was feeling frisky. But I really didn't put forth much of an effort. It was like trying to fix a car that had hit a tree, fallen off a cliff, and then been chewed on and spit out by griffins. It would have taken the bulk of my senior year to explain to her what was wrong with her paper, so I did the bare minimum and let it go. I should make her a mix tape of Schoolhouse Rock songs. It might help.

I was dreading these reviews this week, I guess because my experience with editing other people's work has not been pleasant. I was surprised. I didn't hate it, no, I enjoyed it. Editing is not bad when you're actually editing, not rewriting.

Anyone who knows me should not be surprised that I enjoyed the red ink experience. I've been known to look at the class notes of my friends and make spelling corrections. In the notes, mind you, not in anything that is turned in. I did it last week, actually. The guy looked at me, looked at his now correctly-spelled test notes, and then moved on, when the appropriate response was probably closer to kicking me in the shins. I know it's obnoxious, and I'm trying to quit. Fortunately I have very tolerant friends. And they're pacifists.

I read a story in a book once where this girl wrote a love letter to her english teacher. It was a series of expressions of her undying love separated by ellipses - no sentence structure at all and rotten spelling. He red-inked it and returned it. She killed herself.

That story is my inspiration.

I do not wish for you, dear readers, to take this entry as encouragement to drop me a line telling me of my dropped commas or where you feel that the writing just doesn't flow right. It wouldn't even do you any good to do it anonymously, because I will immediately realize that you are a blood-relative. And I am not a pacifist.

Plus, I just may kill myself. And then what would you read?