What My English Teacher Never Taught Me

I was fortunate in that all my favorite teachers were my English teachers--I always had great ones for my favorite subject. I looked forward to English class, to spending an entire period talking about books--even when we had to do grammar, I liked it (well, not as much . . . ).

When I got to college, I declared an English major pretty quickly. I used to sit with the spring and fall schedules and read through the English department's course offerings like a kid in a candy shop. I took African literature, and I took an entire semester on Milton. I was in heaven. My university had a wonderful English department and except for one odd-duck of a professor, I attended exciting lectures that I truly enjoyed.

But they can't teach you everything.

So often on this blog, we say being a writer is about learning your craft over a period of years. And in thinking about it, even though I had a minor in creative writing, and even though I attended graduate school briefly at NYU for English/Creative Writing, before running out of money, I learned 90% of what I know about writing AFTER college . . . over the last 15 years.

So I started thinking about some of the things I've learned that either directly contradicted my English teachers or that somehow just could not have been learned in a classroom. Here are a few of mine . . . feel free to add yours in the Comments section.

• I learned you really CAN start a sentence with "and" or "because." In one English class, starting a sentence with "because" was grounds for an automatic D on your paper. I start sentences with those words all the time. Just. Because.
• I learned there's something called PACING. Who knew? When you spend four years of college maxing out on 15- to 20-page short stories, pacing is less of an issue. You can just stick all the best stuff in there, focus on ONE major event (no subplots). And though the short story is sadly fading as an art form in this country for lack of places to publish them, a short story won't teach you about pacing the same way a much longer work will.
• I learned there is such a thing as too many adjectives and overuse of adverbs. My teachers used to call adjectives and adverbs adding in the "details." Now I firmly believe less is more.

So how about you? What do you know about writing that your English teachers never told you?