One of my odder gigs as a freelance editor and writer before landing (happily) at NR was to write descriptions of objects in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, which had contracted with the educational publisher I then regularly worked for. These blurbs would accompany photos in a vast database available to schoolchildren.

The objects ranged from significant inventions to works of folk art to historic documents to odds and ends that, no matter how minor — small in both size and significance — played some part in the making of America. For a typical batch of assignments, I’d write summaries of the U.S. Constitution (three or four paragraphs), ads for patent medicines (a short paragraph, maybe, if I could squeeze out that much), and collectible cowboy cards (precursors of baseball cards) from the time of the country’s infatuation with the Wild West. Not the whole pack, but each one, singly. (Did my one or two sentences apiece suffice? I guess so, because the in-house editor never complained.)

Now it’s time for a confession. Hopalong Cassidy and Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup I could handle, or even Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulb. But I had no business writing a summary of the Constitution. Not because I wasn’t conscientious about my work (I was), or because I didn’t appreciate the importance of the subject (I did), but because I had no expertise. I wrote an English major’s summary — a perfectionist sort of English major, but still — and it was probably fine for the most part, at least for the purposes of a seventh-grader doing research for a group social-studies project. And in my own defense, this is how freelancing goes — the people who hired me weren’t worried about my subject-matter expertise.

Not until years later did I realize I’d quite unintentionally concluded my Constitution summary on a note that was politically slanted — toward the left.

This was many computers ago, and the files are long gone, but I remember my error clearly: Striving to end with a flourish, I said something about the Constitution’s enduring principles, its timelessness, such that the document is known as “a living constitution.” I didn’t know a thing then about the debate over living constitutionalism vs. originalism. It sounded, to me, like a vivid way to say “The Constitution is really great.” I can only hope I didn’t plant the seeds of judicial activism in a young mind staring out the window in third period, dreaming of a career in the law.

The highlight of my freelancing years was a college-level reference work on American governance. By then I was older and (I like to think) more enlightened on the subject matter. What was absolutely beautiful about that work was that the editor in chief, a political-science professor, solicited entries from historians, political philosophers, and other political scientists from across the ideological spectrum. I’m astonished even to type out that sentence, given where we are with academic trends, but he managed to do it — and it wasn’t all that long ago.

But a turning point was coming for me. I found myself sinking into a slough of “studies” (particularly gender-studies) despond.

When I think back on the tendentious muck I was hired to copy-edit, I still shudder: professorial essays suffering not only from bad writing but from bad thinking, hopelessly corrupted by academic theory. And the parade of mistakes — it was almost entertaining.

In college reference books, I found this: “Although America engaged in World War II (1939–1945) supposedly to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ . . .” And this: “The degree, to which a hazard is realized, is based on a hazard’s risk.” And this: “Sigmund Freud would later stereotype Africa as the ‘dark continent’ . . .” And: “Regarding sustainability and natural hazards, both understanding and working with nature are prerequisites to taking a sustainable approach to dealing with natural hazards.” To this day I hope this one was part of a hoax: “Studies of prejudice and the brain hold out hope that it may become possible to control unwanted patterns of intergroup thinking and behavior using surgery or drugs.”

The lowest point came when I was hired to copy-edit a book intended for sixth-graders on “current issues.”

In the chapter on “race and the law,” the writer began by explaining what the Founders believed about individual rights. He wrote — I am not making this up — that the United States was founded on the idea that the government gives people rights. It went downhill from there. I never knew what the editor in charge of the volume did with my vehement editorial notes.

Worse still was the chapter on transgenderism, which presented as fact that “the vast majority of experts adhere to one of a few biology-based theories” of what makes a person trans and that the “most widely accepted” of these “centers on the brain” and “involves the mother’s uterus and various hormones.” It continued: “All fetuses begin as females” — the writer evidently not having heard of chromosomes — “and some remain that way. Others are exposed to hormones that turn them into anatomical males.” It was a daft opinion piece masquerading as instruction. I wrote a lot of five-alarm queries for that one too.

I don’t know what version of the book ended up in classrooms. But that was it for me. And here I am.

It’s a cliché to say “Don’t believe everything you read,” but my experience repeatedly refreshed it. Allow me to close with one last solecism from an academic tract — a minor mistake, but a creative one: “Fascism was inherently an ideology of rebirth and renewal on an epoch scale.” You might call that an epoch fail.