Leilen Shelton, a middle school teacher in Costa Mesa, CA, wrote a manual in 2009 called Banish Boring Words, which has sold 80,000 copies. Shelton--and other English teachers--have taken up the cause of to deter their students from using a wide array of words, chief amongst them being the likes of said, good, nice, fun, and thing.
"There are so many more sophisticated, rich words to use," Shelton told the Wall Street Journal, potentially unaware that nearly every award-winning writer for the past 200 years has used said habitually. "‘Said’ doesn’t have any emotion. You might use barked. Maybe howled. Demanded. Cackled. I have a list," said (aww, man) Shelton.
And she's not alone with having a list. The Journal notes that the Powell River Board of Education in British Columbia has a list of 397 alternatives to said alone. Robert C. March, a high school teacher in Atkins, NC, has a list of 26 specific words he bans, including I, we, you, me, so, it, and why--and if a student uses any of those 26 words in a paper he will deduct 5-points immediately. March also bans all contractions.
I'm getting a headache just trying to keep it all straight, and I have a degree in writing. (Wait--is 'I'm' a 5-point deduction for the contraction, or 10-points because it includes 'I'?)
But it gets better when you look at the specifics.
March writes on his own site regarding his policy, "Any banned word, or contraction, that appears in a work submitted to me will count as -5 (minus five) points off the total grade."
Submitted to me.
So March deducts 5-points from himself, right? Not so easy, is it??
What do writers know? I guess The Beatles get a 565-point deduction for writing this song:
The Rock Band video game version was the only sensible take on the song. Thanks, Youtube!
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