I guess you could say some are born to write.

As a child, when other kids were outside playing kickball, I was holed up in some corner of the house reading the dictionary. Yes, reading the dictionary.

I was taken, not only with learning new words, but also discovering how vowels and consonants fit together visually and rhythmically, and how even the simplest sounds connote meaning: the morose drone of the long “o,” the witty quality of the “ie” or “y.” I loved how certain words looked upon the page; and moreover, I was fascinated by the wide spectrum of words in the English language that have more than one meaning — introducing me to the concept of metaphor.

Today, we’re inundated with words coming from all directions 24/7 (everyone has seen the Bing commercial where the mom hears one word and spirals into a tornado of search results). But often across the Web, acronyms replace real words; emoticons become the primary vehicle for conveying emotion. In fact, in some ways, our technological evolution seems to hinge upon a devolution of the word, where meaning is lost in short-hand-style text communication and simple emoticons seem eerily reminiscent of ancient petroglyphs. But hand-in-hand with emoticons and acronyms are millions of people doing something near and dear to my heart: writing. And while not all writing is equal in quality, we now live in an era where digital written communication connects individual to individual, across literal and metaphorical landmasses and oceans.

My eight-year-old daughter was born into this technological world. She learned to aptly use a computer by the time she was three and is adept at navigating just about anything via the web. But her spelling is atrocious. In elementary school, the focus is on phonetics, so misspellings are barely judged, if at all. Imagine my surprise when I discovered in her backpack a handmade, notebook-paper “Dictenary of Words/Definisoins,” with 15 scraps upon which was written one word and definition each: hybrid, a plant or animal produced by parents of different species; neutron, an electrically neutral atomic particle; zenith, a point of the sky directly overhead, highest point, acme. She told me she discovered a dictionary in her classroom and while others played at recess, she decided to read and write down 15 new words per week. With an ol’ No. 2 pencil. On paper. On her own.

It seems that perhaps, even in the digital age, there lives a desire to learn the basics, to discover root words and prefixes, to engage with the beauty of language.

Perhaps she will become a writer like me.

Or at a minimum, one day learn how to spell words correctly.

LOL 🙂