Red Ink
“You called your daughter’s teacher out for using a red pen?” my coworker, Chad, asked yesterday, on our way back from lunch.
“I guess I did,” I responded, “and the next day I sent Ava to school with a box of purple pens.”
I had seen Ava’s fifth grade writing and math papers marked up with red pen, both incorrect and correct answers, so everything looked wrong.
I tried, really hard, to ask a question rather than accuse. “Out of curiosity,” I asked, pointing at my daughter’s paper, “why do you use red ink?”
“Is it because of the page bleeding?” her writing teacher asked. She knew!
I nodded. I can’t count how many times a teacher’s red ink injured the fledgling writer within me.
Teachers don’t have to use red ink.
My favorite writing teacher was in college, the professor of an undergrad writing class where she gave the assignment to write a paper with a list of sample topics.
The last choice was, “Write a 10-page paper that you want to write.”
I chose to write a personal essay, a continuation of one I’d written for high school psychology class that I called, albeit not originally, “I Am Me.” I liked my high school psychology teacher, especially because he asked us, his students, to write about ourselves. As an angst-y teen with divorced parents, I had no problem writing ten pages. I wrote thirty.
When my paper was returned to me, red ink scratched its way through each of the pages, until it finished with a dismissal that what I wrote about was, “too deep for him and the 49ers were playing.” He may have wrote something positive, but that’s not what I remember.
So I tried again, in college, to write on the topic of myself, this time for a petite woman with short brown hair, Birkenstock sandals, and an ergonomic chair where she knelt, rather than sat. I hadn’t seen a chair like that before; it looked contrary and comfortable.
My professor left me encouraging notes throughout the pages, not in red pen, but in pencil.
Teachers can write in pencil? I wondered, as the fledgling writer within me stood up on tremulous legs, gently expanding her unused wings.
Red ink is authoritative and punitive; it gives no room for interpretation or adaptation. Red ink is binary, and writing is never binary. Sure, a word can be misspelled. Grammar may be incorrect. But a thought? A feeling? Those aren’t wrong, ever.
My professor’s corrections in pencil were suggestions, a friend giving me ideas without forcing her position on me.
I wish I could remember my professor’s name, because I’d sing it from the rooftops in gratitude.
Years passed before I started writing again in earnest, but a couple months ago I gave a spiral-bound copy of my first novel to my trusted writing partner & best friend, Becky, encouraging her to “make lots of notes, but please use pencil.”
