The young nursing student asks me for help with her clinical notes. She writes, “I have much exciting but also fears about this my first day.” I point out the incorrect use of the adjective for the noun but find it difficult to stay at the sentence level.

“Because I have not any experience with mental institution. Also my confidence is sinking due to I know my English is in need of many improvement.” It is my job not to overlook the fragment; I decide to wait.

“According to assignment, I must observe my many feeling before patient contact, describe patient and record conversation, so I feel uncertainties among how to assess patients interact with me.” She practices the clinical rules of new conventions in a language with a phonetic alphabet, trying to balance the rigor of honest work with her earnest desire to achieve an A.

“I know I must avoid to do false imprisonment with these patient but I think it will be hard, for how can I say to this man?”

Language hurts. She is trying to express the nurse’s pitfall of false assurance, words of comfort spoken too easily to the patient. Assurance and imprisonment: there are ways in which they resemble one another. She is already asking me how to correct the next line—

“These patient, he seem comfortable to talk with me, although he tells me he is being here not of his own willing.” We discuss conjugation, jargon, subject-verb agreement. I wonder if she feels words are barriers, comfort eroding under a current of text—misinterpretation waiting like a virus to undermine her aspirations. I alter her adverbs, add articles and commas, interpret her devotion to study and her compassion for this man through the filter of grammar and vocabulary. My pen stops briefly. I ask myself whether I act as agent of escape or jailer ushering her into a new cell.

 

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“I sit quietly beside him because at first I think only to comfort him with words that will not be truth, yet I wish to speak truth.”

That sentence, I assure her, is perfect.

Poet, essayist & educator Ann E. Michael is the author of the forthcoming collection Barefoot Girls. Her previous books include Water-Rites and The Capable Heart. She directs the writing center at DeSales University in Pennsylvania. Her website and blog (on poetry, nature, books, and speculative philosophical musing) can be found at www.annemichael.wordpress.com.