If Mary Norris, and not Thomas Shaw, had been my eleventh-grade English teacher I wouldn’t have begun my writing career as an electrical engineer.

Norris, better known to readers of The New Yorker magazine as the Comma Queen, is more than an author, columnist, and copy editor.

She’s a shrewd teacher and an ambassador of optimism for the English language.

One day, toward the end of March, she let me steer our telephone conversation away from her book, Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, and toward a discussion of the fate of the language.

While looking for a story for this blog post, I got an unexpected education.

Every page of Norris’s book serves as evidence that she is in love with the written word. She chooses her words carefully, marshals them, motivates them, and only then dispatches them on their mission.

You can measure her affection with whatever metric you favor. Usage? She’s a copy editor at one of the few remaining English-language publications that actually care about good writing. History? Did you know the derivation of the semicolon? She does.

And how many writers have not only attended a pencil party but written about it as a near-religious experience? A pencil party. Seriously. Replete with giant pencils and lessons on artisanal pencil-sharpening techniques.

When I told Norris I feared the daily flood of images we’re subjected to is eroding the visualness of our writing, she corrected the error in my thesis by starting with a proven teaching strategy.

She agreed with me.

“A word like wonderful or beautiful or the bomb expresses something that you feel, but nobody else is going to feel the same thing because everyone has a different idea of what beautiful means,” she said.

The closest Mr. Shaw came to agreeing with me was a B-minus.

Then she returned to the argument I raised at the start of our chat: Sample the offerings from Amazon.com and you’ll see how many books—be they traditionally- or self-published—demonstrate that written language is becoming as concrete as the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa (who may have struggled with concrete, too).

“We live lives that are permanently in transit,” she said. “We don’t put in the work to choose words because our words feel transitory.”

Transitory?

Most of the words we consume, and perhaps write, on a daily basis live infinite lives on the Internet. Norris caught the irony in her response  (irony being a word I never understood in high school, Mr. Shaw, thank you very much) without prompting.

“I had a blog up on the Internet that I stopped keeping years ago. And I know it’s still there, and there’s no way to get rid of it,” she said. Even over the telephone I could see her smile.

Still, she made her point. I’ve often felt that my words were little more than candy dashing down a conveyor belt in an episode of I Love Lucy. What’s the point in agonizing over them, as writers are romantically wont to do, when the only ones that get noticed are the misfits?

What followed I wish I’d known in high school. It would have saved my engineering-addled brain years of pondering over why I felt compelled to write even as people were less inclined to read.

“Words reach a deeper place in us than pictures,” she said, “because words have to be engraved and thought over and processed more deeply than a picture does. Words come with a voice attached which has a human element that we don’t want to lose and that’s very important and very individual.”

“I think there’s lots of energy and amusement in expressions such as LOL and LMFAO,” she said, anticipating my next question of whether our language, or our use of it, is changing for the worse. “I enjoy finding out what these mean but I can’t bring myself to use them. I think it’s generational. It would be like having my nose pierced, as if I were trying to fit in where I don’t belong.”

In other words, change is coming and we’d better get used to it, I said to her, quick to grasp the negative from the jaws of the positive.

“It’s better to embrace it,” Norris said gently, “because if you resist it you just get left behind. I’m saying this as someone who defended the third person singular in a New Yorker video and I’m still getting roasted for that.”

Still, Norris is not about to hand over the keys to writing that shirks its responsibility to express what cannot be pictured, such as how we feel, what we think, and why we behave the way we do.

“I always think of writing as something that connects us to the people who went before us. It connects us to a tradition. So, you want yours to be worthy of the tradition.”

From now on, I vow that even my grocery lists will be exemplars of the writing craft: a yellow box of wheat-colored, round Cheerios instead of breakfast cereal.

And wherever Mr. Shaw is, I hope he has access to a library. There’s a book I want him to read.

Courtesy of Mary Norris