I remember having my English teacher as my favorite teacher in the world when I was in primary school. We had a love-hate relationship back then but it was her, I remember vividly, who unleashed my passion for writing. We had a love-hate relationship because I had more than a dozen books hidden in my drawers confiscated by her and because she caught me reading while she was teaching! Anyway, one day, she asked us all to write about an exciting day we had on the way to school….which most of us most probably didn’t have! I was having a particularly bad day that day but managed to churn out a nice piece of composition for her using my imagination. Thinking back about it, I wrote that piece a little differently that day. Because I was frustrated, I ditched everything she thought me.

I wasn’t thinking about grammar or how suitable or ‘true’ the situation was. While the rest of the kids wrote about saving cats from trees, uncles falling down, feeling sick on the way to school or finding a coin on the street, I wrote about a robbery…..which wasn’t true at all, of course! But that composition won me praises from my favorite teacher in the world and admiration from the rest of the class.

Why am I writing this after all this time? Simple. Based on my experience as a writer, I feel a need to share this with as many aspiring writers. Forget about your English teacher! Yes, it’s true. In fact, ask any writer and they’ll tell you that the best thing they’ve learned in school about writing and the English language is how to spell. Well, we don’t even need to know how to spell very well these days because we have Microsoft Word spelling and correcting everything for us these days!

The secret to being a successful writer is to write with your head and your heart. Write the way you want to write, how you want to be established as a writer, how do you want to be known and don’t even think about whether it’s grammatically correct or not. If you have the skill, everything will be alright in the end. It’s only when you let everything go, let every single leash that is or have been holding you back go that you can shine as a writer.

Believe me, even if you love writing, writing for a long period of time can get to you. Things can get mundane when you have to write pieces and copy that is of no interest to you at all. But if you inject your own personality and style into it, the piece becomes, almost automatically, more interesting.

My teacher often told me, “Marsha, don’t start with ‘and’, ‘but’ and don’t let your sentences hang”. Now, scroll up and see how many sentences are hanging and how many times I started the sentence with ‘But’, ‘Because’ and ‘And’. But why, you must be asking.

The secret is this…..this is the way we talk! If you want your articles to come out as lively, full of personality and conversational, you’ve got to let all those rules your English teacher taught you go.

It’s not that your English teacher wasn’t any good….oh no, far from it. It’s just that your teacher didn’t know any better and she wasn’t a writer, she’s a teacher. And she didn’t have the Internet back then. Can you blame her?

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