It was the end of a sweet, sunny spring day. Mom and dad were just turning down the covers to climb into bed when mom found my note on her pillow. Scrawled in 7-year-old handwriting in pencil on a torn piece of lined notebook paper, I had written:
Thank You for letting Us Keep this Caterpillar!
Stifling a scream, my mom choked on the words, “THIS caterpillar...” and began to examine pillows and strip the covers and sheets looking for the caterpillar, assuming that I had placed the caterpillar on her pillow with the note before I had gone to bed instead of where the caterpillar actually lay—in the firefly jar hidden in my room.
I had been staring at the caterpillar when I wrote the note before my bedtime, while my brother, Scott, tried to feed it a torn leaf. I knew that keeping the caterpillar for long would probably be discouraged, but we hadn’t asked my parents yet, and this little note gave me a chance to announce that Scott and I had a caterpillar and intended on keeping it, thank you.
We usually got a little less than a week with the box turtles confined to the aluminum rimmed ditch surrounding the laundry room’s vent outside; the baby ring-neck and garter snakes were in the sandbox in the backyard for as long as my brothers and I played with them, making tunnels and castles for them out of the coarse construction sand. I am not sure my parents ever knew about them. The tadpoles that appeared each spring in the feet long and wide puddles of the gravel driveway that led to my friend Denny’s house were gathered in a jar for a while, too. Sometimes the tadpoles made their appearance in my mom’s preschool class for the kids to watch their transformation. Nothing too dangerous (I hope) and nothing wildly furry every made it into the house for too long but that did not stop my brothers and me from trying.
Over forty years later, the caterpillar note story has become one of my mom’s favorite stories to tell about my childhood, and for years I had to explain why I choose the word that sent my mother into a panic—this caterpillar. It was a matter of perspective.
A writer’s perspective can be very different from a reader’s perspective. Whether deadline driven, hyper-focused or distracted during composition, writers can be caught up in the moment and make word choices that are unintended, offensive, unclear, confusing, surprising or alarming for the reader.
Providing a reader’s point of view is one benefit of visiting the Writing Center. The second set of eyes and a friendly reader’s perspective can help a writer see word choices in a new light.
While your word choices in essays, fiction, nonfiction, lab reports, and research papers may not alarm your instructors or scar them for life, a little bit of perspective and some laughter can make writing a little more enjoyable — for both the writer and the reader.
