Writing Boots

The Chicago marketing agency Leff Communications put out a video last week in which production editor Morgan Strunsky urged people not to let “flagxiety”—the fear of having your writing flagged as AI-generated—stop them from using em dashes in their writing.

Hear—hear!

But anyone who’s worried their writing will be flagged as AI-written should have been worried for years that their writing was being dismissed quietly for its lack of style and unique point of view and original ideas.

Which is a lot of people, in the period since it became a professional requirement for every white-collar worker bee to purport to offer consistent “thought leadership” on LinkedIn.

When I came into the communication business three decades ago, there were trade publications whose editors and columnists did the thinking for the profession. We published letters to the editor from practitioners who objected or amplified those ideas.

When the Internet came in, another relative handful of new voices came in, some of them speaking loudly and well on online forums and with their own blogs. But those folks were always outliers, and there was absolutely zero pressure for every working communicator to be a talking head, too—and in some cases, there was pressure against it.

Not that those were the good old days.

But great writers and iconic thinkers are rare, in any profession, in any society. And if my LinkedIn contacts are now using AI to compose their important-sounding drivel, they don’t have to worry about being “flagged” by me, because I probably stopped eating their prose porridge years ago—after the first or second serving.

I don’t go in for that “selfless mothers” trope any more than I go for the “teachers are heroes” routine. Pay the teachers and don’t make the mothers hide their light under a bushel, I say.

Yet, I just spent two years writing and one year promoting a book about how Scout’s teacher mom I raised her. And naturally, I called it Soccer Dad.

Yes, I dedicated the book to her, writing an opening note

about my wife, Cristie Bosch, who appears in this book far less frequently than she would if it were titled Soccer Parents. It’s called Soccer Dad because I write best when I speak for myself, and my own experience. My wife, of course, was my full partner in this soccer parenting effort, from getting Scout signed up to her first tyke’s soccer program to counseling Scout throughout her college soccer experience. Ask the bartender at the Ohio University Inn the evening after we dropped Scout off at college: Cristie and I shared the joys and the sorrows equally. We also sometimes differed in our emotional reactions to games and their consequences. But most of that tension was creative, and all of it helped the two of us see this strangely shaped project from another point of view. And another point of view—sometimes any other point of view—is often exactly what a soccer parent needs to maintain perspective in an often-warped world.

Ultimately, how we performed as soccer parents is probably just a measure of how we performed as parents. However well or poorly we did at both, Scout’s mom and I did this together, and I dedicate this book to her.

… and of course I was very happy she got some love by Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Kogan (and Trib photographer John Kim) in a piece on the book launch last month.

But still, it must be said: Cristie Bosch is a hero teacher, and also is a mother who gives more than she gets—as all mother birds do—and as Scout well knows.

Scout, who has flown off with her old teammates on a post-graduation tour of Europe, leaving Dadbird to hold down the Mother’s Day action around here. As usual, I’m scrounging for a last-minute gift.

I was touched by this moment a couple years ago, and I’m touched by it again, as we go into this weekend.

We’ll watch this together Sunday, and there won’t be a dry eye in our house.