To impress upon the students in my homeschooling seminars the importance of writing, I would point out our everyday dependence on the written word, ranging from medical charts and legal briefs to police reports, inventories, and emails to the boss. Billions of dollars, I would tell the class, are lost annually because of poor communications. I would ask them whether the inadvertent use of a word or a badly constructed sentence on social media had ever led to a misunderstanding with a friend.
But the argument that best captured their attention involved a fictitious John and Mary, newly graduated from college, strangers whose eyes lock together while at a party. (At this point, I would torment my students by singing a few bars of “Some Enchanted Evening” from “South Pacific.") It’s love at first sight, and they spend the rest of the evening entranced with each other, oblivious to those around them.
