The Book Was Fast Tracked Right After We Found A Font Where The I's Were Dotted With Smiley Faces

Frequent readers of this blog know that there are no happy endings...er...we mean know that we earn our bread toiling in the fields of the local educorporate training facility as educational technicians, more specifically molding today's youth into young Aristoltes Ciceros, Vicos and Blairs.

For the record, we could not write the previous with a straight face. Anyway, it has come to our attention that a new star has risen in the rhetorical universe and it burns. Uh, brightly, burns brightly we mean. Sorry about that.

Fans and foes alike are hoping for surprises in Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, which leapfrogged Dan Brown and Glenn Beck to the top of the Amazon.com bestseller last week before even being published. But with a few weeks to go until the book hits shelves on Nov. 17, the biggest shocker so far is the sheer speed with which she wrote it.

Now, having read our share of hastily constructed students papers, we aren't necessarily impressed with the speed at which ideas can be vomited onto the page, but with the quality of said ideas.

Palin's publisher says the answer is simple: hard work. "When she resigned as governor, she had a lot more time and was able to really devote herself full-time to writing the book," says Tina Andreadis, a spokesperson for HarperCollins. "That's really all that there is."

OK, now while this might sound impressive to those outside of the fraternity of professional educators, we--whose motto is: Crap! Not four sections of freshman comp again--know that speed and hard work seldom are seen in the same neighborhood, and in fact are often mutually exclusive.

Palin had help. Editorial sidekicks are par for the course in political memoirs, though ghostwriters say many pols are heavily involved in the writing process. Palin's assist came from Lynn Vincent, a writer for the Christian news magazine WORLD, who has also co-authored several other books.

See, now this makes sense. It's like we teach our students, if you put your name on someone else's work, that's plagiarism. If you pay to put your name on someone else's work, that's publishing gold.

Palin was apparently clear from the start about her book's mission: "It will be nice through an unfiltered forum to get to speak truthfully about who we are and what we stand for and what Alaska is all about," she told the Anchorage Daily News back in May, when the deal was first announced.

Clear goals are essential, but it is just as important to be realistic about abilities, so with a writer like Sarah, while we might praise her clarity of vision, we might also point out that accomplishing her objective will be difficult with a vocabulary that consists of words of less than three syllables.

The publisher has to calculate whether or not getting a book out quickly will drive up sales. In that sense, the decision to expedite Palin's memoir was a slam dunk, since the quick turnaround ensures the book will hit shelves with just 38 shopping days until Christmas. "It's holiday time, which is the best, best time to sell a book," says HarperCollins' Andreadis.

Well, that certainly makes sense. We mean, here's a book that's a perfect gift for the book lovers on your list who can't read.