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How I Became a Wordsmith
By Mary A. Flowers
 I was on my way to meet with my Art History Professor to talk about my recent paper. I didn't know what to expect. I had not done too well on my first paper. As I sat down in his office he said, "You're a wordsmith like me, aren't you?" I had no idea what he meant by that. He went on to say, "I like your paper very much. It is different; unlike any paper ever written in my class. It is unique." Needless to say, I felt an immense weight taken off my shoulders. I just hoped that meant I got an "A" on the paper.
He explained that he had a love affair with words – how they fit together and how he tried to find the exact word to match his meaning. I sort of knew this from his lectures since he often went off on a tangent about a particular word and its origins. To me it was fascinating. He said, "You must have had some pretty good teachers along the way." That got me to thinking about some of the teachers from my early schooldays.
I remembered Mrs. Bishop, the teacher I had for both 5th and 6th grades at a small country school in Roanoke, Texas. She was very particular about syllabing (dividing a word into its syllables) and assigned students 25 words a week to syllabicate, write the meaning of each word, and then write two sentences using each word. Needless to say, you would pretty much know each word by the time each exercise was done! After the 6th grade we moved to the city and I attended North Richland Hills Junior High. I was lucky enough to have Mrs. Phelps for 8th Grade Grammar. She made this class enjoyable and this much-beloved teacher had a way of keeping us young kids interested.
Then in 10th Grade at Richland High School I had Mr. Moseley. He was the teacher who taught us to write. We wrote essays, term papers, and paragraphs throughout the school year. We particularly enjoyed squaring off for sentence diagramming matches. It was sort of like a spelling bee but our goal was to stump the opposing team. We spent a lot of time trying to craft a sentence they couldn't figure out.
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