The Surprising Way Teaching Transformed My Writing Forever
30 years in education taught me how to edit with empathy
I used to grade essays in airport lounges.
On buses. At red lights. Once, in a bathroom stall during a wedding reception. I never had time, but somehow the papers still needed comments in the margins and a final score circled in red. I wasn’t thinking about sentence rhythm or dialogue tags. I was trying to decipher whether Kyle meant “the affect was strong” or “the effect was strong.” It was triage. Educational triage.
What I didn’t realize back then was how much I was learning about writing while trying to teach it. I had to translate vague thoughts into clear feedback. I had to strip away fluff and ask the hard question: what are you really trying to say here? I wasn’t writing essays, but I was pulling them apart with a scalpel and a highlighter.
I taught Biology, not English. But I taught it like a writing teacher would. I made students explain their reasoning, justify conclusions, reflect on their mistakes. I also taught college courses later in my career, which forced me to communicate more clearly to adults who weren’t as forgiving. My grading stack shifted from lab reports and scientific analyses to leadership reflections and policy briefs. The genre changed, but the editing muscle stayed the same.
There was a stretch where I’d average over 100 essays a week. Some were brilliant, most were not, and a few were so off-topic I wondered if the student had even read the prompt. One paper argued that Hamlet would’ve been a great Instagram influencer. It was totally wrong, yet weirdly persuasive. I left a smiley face next to the thesis.
I started to see every piece of writing as a puzzle. Each misstep taught me something about what readers misunderstand and where clarity breaks down. The more I helped others revise, the more I heard my own inner editor sharpen. Teaching writing forced me to listen better, to spot when someone was dancing around a point due to fear. I saw students use five sentences to say what one would do. I saw myself in those sentences, padding, apologizing, circling. My own work became leaner over time, tighter. Clearer.
