Dragons, Dog Tags And The Death Of The Oxford Comma

My hometown state university has done it. They’ve found the only person on earth less likely to teach a group of conservative military members how to write than a pacifist mime.

Picture it: twenty uniformed soldiers sitting in a classroom, notebooks open, waiting to learn the sacred craft of writing. In walks their instructor—tattooed, rainbow-scarfed, wielding a coffee mug that says Death Before Grammar Rules. She announces she’s a bisexual, queer fantasy author who hates punctuation, and somewhere in the distance, an eagle sheds a single tear.

Look, I love a little ideological whiplash as much as the next person, but there’s something deeply ironic about this pairing. Imagine a group of soldiers—trained to follow strict orders and communicate with military precision—being taught by someone whose personal motto could be “Let’s see where the sentence takes us.”

This is not the kind of match-up anyone expected. On one side, men and women who operate in a world where “attention to detail” isn’t just a phrase—it’s a survival skill. On the other, a woman who once wrote a 300-page novel without a single semicolon because “it felt too judgy.”

The culture clash potential here is Olympic-level.

·       She says, “Subject-verb agreement is a social construct.”

·       They say, “Roger that,” and triple-check their commas.

·       She says, “Stories matter more than syntax.”

·       They say, “Tell that to the guy who misread the coordinates.”

The part that really gets me is the marketing. Why lead with your sexuality in a writing class description? I don’t take a cooking class because the chef is bisexual; I take it because they know how not to burn a brisket. The same goes for writing. Impress me with verbs, not personal labels.

I’m not here to say she can’t teach. I’m just saying that leading with “I’m a bisexual woman who hates grammar rules” is about as relevant to writing instruction as telling your mechanic you’re gluten-free. Interesting? Sure. Useful? Debatable.

Still, credit where credit’s due—this woman has guts. Walking into a classroom full of soldiers and announcing, “Forget everything you know about structure,” takes a kind of courage that doesn’t come from a boot camp. But if these guys start sending each other field reports in lowercase with no punctuation, I’m blaming the syllabus.

Of course, maybe this is the beginning of something beautiful. The soldiers could leave inspired to write sweeping queer dragon epics. The instructor could finally see the poetry in a well-placed colon. And me? I’ll be in the back, grading their essays—with a red pen the size of a bayonet.

See you in the margins,

--Bookstore Geek