Sometimes I miss the third grade

When I was in the third grade, I remember a classroom exercise where we had to write out directions for someone to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from scratch, starting with the bread in a closed bag and the peanut butter and jelly both in closed jars.  We had to write in excruciating detail; the teacher would not perform any action not specifically detailed in our instructions, and if we wrote something like "spread the jelly on the bread" without first specifying how she needed to pick up the knife with one hand, how to hold the knife, how she needed to get jelly on the knife (after previously detailing how to open the jar), how to spead jelly, etc., she would stop and not complete the task.  I remember loving the assignment and writing a whole paragraph just on undoing the twisty tie on the bread bag and getting one bread slice out.  I love precision when choosing words in writing, and I frequently think of that exercise.  I thought of it when taking the critical reading portions of standardized tests in school and finding a lack of precision in the writing that led to either multiple answers being correct or none being correct without more precision in the diction.  I thought of it in middle school when we had a great textbook called "Word Within the Word" that examined the Latin and Greek roots of words, and our tests consisted of giving word-perfect definitions for both the roots and the words.  And I thought of it this week when taking a test based on the training manual for a new part-time job and being utterly frustrated with the inconsistencies between the words in the manual and the answers available from which to choose.  I feel like writing short explanations in the margins of why none of the above is correct based on the words selected in the manual... but I also feel like that would probably be frowned upon....  So instead I'm writing this blog post, urging everyone to write out instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  It's an awesome exercise, really.  And you get to reward yourself with yummy deliciousness upon completion.  Oh, and on a related note, be careful with your grammar, too.  After all, punctuation saves lives....