John, there is a difference between literarcy and creative writing. Creative writing is a talent. It cannot be taught. You're born with it.

A talent is something that one does not have to be taught. It is there without being taught. I was published by the time I was 10 or 11l. I f you google my portfolio, you will see the tearsheets.

My daughter was an artist at 8 years old - her work that of a fine artist. At my sister's first ballet class at 6 years old, her teacher went to my mother and said, "She's world class." At 6 years old, Sunday school teachers started asking my brother to sing in choruses.

Talent cannot be taught.

Yes literacy can be taught, and it should be taught. Everybody needs to be able to read and write, and, fortunately, these are basic skills, and they can be taught. However, in the same sense that dancing on the floor at a club is not the same thing as dancing the lead ballerina at a performance, so creative writing is not the same thing as basic literacy.

Certainly, you can encourage people, and certainly you can attempt to write short stories. And, yes, you have a point, if you write to a grade 7 level, someone at a grade 6 level won't know that you're making mistakes. The point, however, is that you're teaching people how to write incorrectly.

Americans speak really BADLY. They don't know the difference between an adverb and an adjective. How did this happen? Well, people copy other people, and when other people go on TV or start teaching at schools, and they are wrong, then their students are wrong as well.

Encouraging people to do something might make you feel good, but you are not in a position to teach something that you're not a master at. And if your grammar needs work, you need to go back to school to learn to construct a sentence properly.