Meet a graduate: Tom Campbell
By Brodie Lancaster
It’s a bit ironic that this column is called ‘Meet a graduate’ because I’ve never actually met Tom Campbell, but I still think of him every time I read footy news at this time of year.
After the AFL season ends, and through October and November, players are busy signing new contracts, retiring, being traded, and otherwise changing colours or packing away their boots for good.
Tom was playing footy for the Western Bulldogs when he signed up for Stop. Grammar Time.—The Good Copy’s flagship course—and during a class on ‘sticks and dots’ (which covers hyphens and semicolons and commas and dashes and all those things that can either clarify or really fuck up your sentences), he offered the perfect example of their power. ‘At work,’ he told Penny, in a comment I’m summarising because I wasn’t there, ‘people don’t realise that you need a hyphen when you’re talking about a player re-signing their contract; otherwise, it looks like they’re resigning.’ It was the most efficient and excellent way to capture the power of hyphens and the way they affect everyone from full-time writers to footy players who are made to look as if they’ve quit when they actually want to keep playing.
When I called Tom for a chat about grammar school, he was in a bit of career limbo. After farewelling the Doggies, he was waiting to see whether he’d find a new home in the AFL or it was time for a bigger change: ‘“I don’t know if I’m on holidays or unemployed” is what I’ve been telling people!’ A couple of weeks later, he was snapped up by North Melbourne and not my beloved Richmond, which blows for me but is nice for him, I guess.
Tom was encouraged, as a kid, to appreciate and be challenged by words and language. He held on to the fundamentals he learnt at school but, like most of us, lost touch with the spelling and grammar rules as time passed.
We don’t often think that burly, rough-as-guts AFL players are reading the front section of the paper with a red pen in hand, identifying mistakes they see and offering corrections. But it’s a bit of a tired cliché to categorise all athletes as walking biceps with sloshy brains. Especially when we’re talking about a club like the Bulldogs, the perennial underdogs whose 2016 premiership was something like a fairytale, complete with the guardian angel of injured—and now retired—captain Bob Murphy, whom Tom described as ‘a bit of a word nerd’ when I asked about him. (Because even when my job is to ask questions about grammar, I can’t not also ask about Bob. He’s got a book out now, which neither Tom nor I have read but we both plan to. It’s supposed to be very good! Anyway, back to grammar …)
Tom was studying an undergraduate degree in business when he enrolled in Stop. Grammar Time.—something I’m sure gives him a lot of peace of mind, especially during TBC periods like the one he and plenty of other footballers find themselves in during recruitment season. ‘I think you have to always be prepared for what comes next.’
Completing the Good Copy course and his degree at the same time helped Tom figure out how language needs to adapt depending on context. ‘You know, sometimes I need to write in a really formal way for university essays, but if I’m sending an email, that same approach might be a bit off-putting for the person on the other end.’ Taking the course has helped him ‘make conscious decisions about [his] writing and remain consistent about those’.
While Tom doesn’t call himself a writer, he finds himself doing a lot of writing, like all of us who own phones and are Extremely Online. It’s in that kind of incidental life-writing that the tools he picked up at Stop. Grammar Time. have proved most helpful. ‘Whether it’s emails or social media or whatever, it’s good to be able to make sure that what I’m trying to say is actually what I’m saying.’
‘I think the best thing Stop. Grammar Time. helped me with was taking a lot of the “rules” away from writing and knowing that it’s about decisions—and being consistent with my decisions,’ he tells me, kinda nailing the way the course is really for everyone who uses words. You don’t need to be an aspiring capital-w Writer to want to know how to use words properly. It’s a life skill, like knowing how to light a fire or cook something delicious without a recipe.
If you’d like to meet a graduate in person—or become one yourself—book in for one of our Stop. Grammar Time. classes in Melbourne or Sydney.
