How Poorly-Written Textbooks Turned Me into an English Major

For my first two years of college, I leapfrogged from major to major like a deranged amphibian with commitment issues.

First stop: Criminal Justice. Sounded cool. Maybe I’d end up solving high-stakes crimes or unraveling some Kafkaesque legal conundrum. Instead, I found myself buried under a mountain of legalese so bloated with provisos, caveats, and contingencies that the independent clause was held hostage somewhere deep in the sentence, gasping for air. Every paragraph felt like a hostage negotiation with words like “notwithstanding” and “heretofore.” It drove me to the brink of syntactical madness.

Next up: Sociology and Psychology—where common sense observations were drenched in enough self-important jargon to make a cult leader blush. Every sentence oozed the smug satisfaction of someone who thought they had just cracked the meaning of life. Instead of learning anything useful, I was forced to machete my way through a linguistic swamp of words like codependency, interconnectivity, dichotomy, marginalization, and facilitate. I clenched my body so tightly while reading these textbooks that I was convinced I would give myself a self-induced inguinal hernia.

Desperate for clarity, I gave history a shot. But history textbooks—perhaps fearing the sheer tonnage of facts, dates, and places—responded by stripping the prose of all personality. No rhythm, no opinion, no soul—just a flatline of remedial drudgery. If legal writing was a labyrinth and psychology was a swamp, history was a beige waiting room with no exit.

Then, an epiphany: I wasn’t rejecting these subjects—I was rejecting their horrendous writing.

I craved something—something crisp, something electric, something that didn’t feel like linguistic waterboarding. That hunger led me, almost involuntarily, to the English major. There, for the first time, I met grammar—not as a dry set of rules, but as a cosmic force.

Grammar wasn’t just necessary—it was alive. It was the invisible scaffolding that made human expression possible. It was breathing, movement, structure, music. I marveled at the fact that even small children, with no formal training, could construct intricate, nuanced sentences. This wasn’t just mechanics—this was the architecture of thought itself.

When I thought of grammar, I didn’t think of dull worksheets. I saw rivulets flowing into streams, streams merging into great rivers, rivers pouring into the ocean. I saw harmony, inevitability, the relentless beauty of structure.

So, in the end, it wasn’t a love of books or storytelling that made me an English major. It was the sheer, visceral disgust at bad writing that left me no other choice.