Every English class I remember being in – which includes the four times I dropped 104 on the first day – loved prewriting.

That seemed to be the most important part of the curriculum. I can recall lesson upon lesson teaching us what free-writing, clustering and brainstorming are all about.

Does the English department get funding from some private organization of prewriting-philes? Do they have a pact with the dark forces of prewriting and offer tribute to them in order to keep power? The answer to both of these questions is, “well, maybe.”

It would appear that rather than teaching students how to write in classes, they have instead taught us the art of rewriting. Certainly our pre and rewriting processes would work a great deal better if we had some concept of how to write in the first place. Instead we are taught to pre-write first to conjure up ideas, like we were to harness the infernal power of the demon of prewriting: “Oh, dark lord of clustering give me the strength to write this paper, accept my ritual.”

The manner I learned how to write was not directly from my education. Certainly, I have been taught to read by this glorious exploration of the language I was born into. However, I had to learn how to write from reading. Once the rudimentary elements of reading were figured out, I was pushed off into the world and told to prewrite as if it would save me from the wrath of angry English teachers.

Why is it that all of the English teachers I have ever had seemed to be so angry? A theory I have is that they, long before I did, realized their subject of expertise was useless. I am not claiming that no one speaks, reads or writes in English – that would be ridiculous.

However, I am making a claim similar to John Locke. Words are symbols, they change and are altered by each individual that experiences those symbols. The rules of grammar and writing change as a language “evolves,” and it is pointless to keep track of them.

I am reminded of the rule of the split infinitive. The reason splitting infinitives is frowned upon is because some guy said so.

In the end, our rules of English are based on nothing more than a series of “some guy said so” statements. The manner we use to communicate has been chosen arbitrarily and then ignored, only to be reformatted by the Modern Language Association every year to the dismay of anyone who reads or writes in English. These MLA rules are then ignored by MLA as an attempt to, once again, figure out what English is.

I say give it up. If anything this article is a call for lingual anarchy. I’ve even adapted a war cry for us, “No Gods, No Masters, No Prewriting, Against all Authority, Lingual Anarchy.”

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