My First Post, and a Disclaimer

Coming from a background of education I am concerned about my writing for two reasons. First, the teacher within me scrutinizes everything I write. Somewhere in the process of grading many papers I lost my internal spell check. Not to worry, most word process programs have a spell check.

What concerns me the most is I have to think twice about simple things. “Do the quotes go inside or outside the period or question mark? When do I use the hyphen? Is this a run-on sentence? Do I need a comma here?” It would be wise for me to hire a professional editor for everything I write; however, the time and cost would make this prohibitive. But most important I would not capture the many ideas percolating through my mind and heart. The joy in sharing in a blog would loose its appeal with so many rewrites.

Second, I really do not know if I am a good writer. My husband is a voracious reader. While enjoying a book he will stop, ponder for a moment, and then announce, “He/she is such a good writer.” I honestly do not know what that means. What makes a good writer? I am exploring that with him.

If I wait for perfection I would never write a blog. I probably would never have written my first book, Empowerment in the Classroom, which to my chagrin, contained many mistakes even after numerous edits by different people. Am I embarrassed? You bet. Yet, teachers, parents, and just the average person have responded positively to the contents of the book. I know of one excellent teacher who was going down in defeat because of a difficult class. A beginning teacher was apprehensive about her classroom management skills. They attribute my book to getting them through a challenging time. Best of all, for the future generations, we did not loose two proficient teachers.

The Disclaimer for Writing My Blog

I will write my blog unedited and share what is on my mind and heart. If you are a person looking for mistakes in my writing and find any, please consider they were put there on purpose because some folks are always looking for mistakes and I don’t want to disappoint them.

Arlene