My Mission

With a “big” move on the horizon at the end of 2024 and the mindset that less is more, I dedicated a good portion of 2024 to paring down and organizing my belongings. During that process, I came across the personal statement that I wrote around the fall of 2004 for my Multiple Subject Teaching Credential Program application, “Item #16” in my application. My first thought when I saw the paper was, “What were my writing skills like 20 years ago?”

With hesitation and a mixture of curiosity and fear (predominantly fear), I picked up the document, and while I mentally prepared myself to read it, I reminded myself that when I wrote the paper, I wasn’t fortunate to have the grammar and editing knowledge that I have today and, thus, my writing skills were inferior to what they are today.

As I began reading through the two-page double-spaced paper, with my imaginary red pen in hand and the same watchful eyes that I read my students’ papers with, I quickly noticed that the paper was sprinkled with grammatical sentence structure errors and punctuation errors, primarily comma ones. To this day, it still baffles me that I somehow made it all the way through college without receiving grammar or editing instruction in my English classes. That absence of instruction forced me to write based on how words and punctuation marks looked in my writing—not based on where rules said they should go—always leaving me wondering if my writing had been properly written and, in turn, creating an ongoing sense of helplessness.

It was that constant wondering that finally made me become dedicated, in approximately 2010 and onward, to learning as much as I could about writing so that I could feel confident and empowered when writing instead of unsure and weak.

Once my writing expertise began to blossom, I then, in 2014, became dedicated to sharing that expertise with elementary through high school students so that they could enter the “real world” as confident and empowered writers who don’t have to indefinitely waste time running everything they write through writing assistant apps—apps that regularly provide inaccurate recommendations—or worse yet indefinitely rely on someone or something to write for them.

My mission to share my writing expertise with elementary through high school students was derived from the lack of writing expertise that was shared with me when I was in elementary through high school, and it has been a steadfast mission ever since, helping hundreds of kids become the writers that others aspire to be.

~ Christina Caputo

Founder & Owner of ★ W O R D S