They taught us grammar in elementary school but I never retained anything past “subject” and “object” because the main exercise by which we were trained was “Daily Edit"s of like 3 diff. sentences written wrong on the board and you had to write them right and I just did by writing them the way they were obviously supposed to go

The quizzes I treated like logic games, if we’d been learning about indirect objects or the past participle or something there’d be like 2 questions out of 10 defining it with obvious answers and you could leverage the others out from those

I was a precocious and voluminous reader, that came natural, I thought I was aware of it and not taking it for granted until I took a freshman writing seminar at my Ivy League school and we swapped papers, I ended up getting my partner to read his aloud and being like "Would you say that and expect it to make sense? Then how would you say that? Now write that down.”