It’s around this time in the semester that I feel the particular burden of being a teacher of creative writing in an English department within a liberal-arts college. Not that we are any more burdened, generally, than other profs grading midterms. But it’s a peculiar position to be in when it comes to marking student prose for questions of usage.
Most, if not all, students come to college believing that their English teachers are the ones in charge of appropriate use of written language. Many of these same students begin their college careers in some sort of expository writing class that is taught either by a member of the English department or by a writing instructor in a composition or comp/rhet program that both students and professors from other departments view as a wholly owned subsidiary of the English department.
As these students emerge from said comp courses, or from …