I’ve always strived to write well, more so in the last 10 years when the idea of ‘my book’ has been lingering. Both my sons write well; the oldest one loves to write and is already a published author in his field.
I believe I also speak clearly although my English accent is still misunderstood (more by adults than young children!) even after 35 years in the US. I don’t enjoy speaking in public, ever. Probably one of my New Year’s resolutions (I’ve made none as yet!) could be to join Toastmasters to overcome my aversion to public speaking.
However, both my sons are extremely capable in a public arena (and I mean ‘arena’, sometimes they have to speak before hundreds of people and even perform their beloved barbershop harmony in front of thousands of people!). The son who loves to write is often the least comfortable before such a large audience but thoroughly enjoys speaking and teach in his professional field – he is the ‘web designer of note’ in our family, Dan Rubin.
Writing and speaking well are qualities that substantially affect one’s whole life, no matter one’s career choices. They weren’t attributes that were valued during my upbringing or education. I was on the tail end of ‘seen and not heard’ when children were at home and ‘sit down and shut up’ when at school!! And from this we were supposed to produce independent and thoughtful writing?!! Sometimes I feel they are even less valued attributes in today’s educational institutions.
I suppose I could say that one of the biggest advantages of home education is the opportunity to learn and exercise the ability to speak clearly and frequently and to be capable of writing on topics more diverse than ‘what did you do last summer?’.
Such opportunities to learn not only benefited my children but me too. I also held them to phenomenally high standards in any of their written, spoken and design work. In my mind we were an ‘Exhibit A Family’ for our unconventional home education programme, started in the earliest days of the more conventional ‘home schooling’ in Florida, and I never wanted anyone to be able to point a finger at us for not aspiring to excellence, at the very least.
This Christmas I received a gardening book from an old gardening friend. She was excited that she, living in the US, had found a book by an English gardening writer, Christopher Lloyd, and also that I knew of the author, although I’ve never visited his garden, Great Dixter, in the south of England.
What I am most fascinated by is his wonderful style and quirky command of the English language. ‘In My Garden’ is a compilation of seasonal essays he wrote in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s for Country Life magazine. They read like a contemporary blog! But it’s a style of British writing I now realise I strive to emulate.
Coupled with the quality of the writing is the actual composition of the book, the design if you will – the layout and font chosen, the quality of the paper and other details – which, as well as covering one of my favourite topics, makes it an even more interesting read.
I hope the content of the writing on this blog in 2008 will match up to the high level of readability in its redesign – thanks Dan!