Good writing often starts with a good teacher. Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close , and other critically acclaimed bestsellers, credits a lot of his own success to the transformative experience of taking a fiction workshop with Joyce Carol Oates during his sophomore year at Princeton, having originally thought he’d study medicine.

“I went into her class with no ambition to become a writer,” he said in an interview with New York Magazine in 2010, “and I left it wanting to be a writer because of the things she showed me. Ever since, I always thought it would be nice to do that for someone else.”

Few people get the chance to have the specific opportunity Foer describes: a fiction workshop at one of the world’s best universities taught by someone whose literary accolades include everything from a National Book Award, to a National Humanities Award, to five separate nominations for the Pulitzer Prize. Yet perhaps there has been, in your own life, a teacher whose efforts and influence has similarly helped you develop as a writer.

Maybe that teacher is someone you had in college. Maybe they’re someone you had in high school or middle school. Or maybe they’re someone you met outside a formal educational environment: your mom, your boss, your best friend.

The next discussion forum, “ Good Writing, Good Teaching ,” gives you a space to celebrate them.

You don’t have to include the person’s actual name if you don’t feel comfortable doing that--and certainly if you don’t think they would feel comfortable with you doing that. But briefly identifying what made their approach so special and effective could be a good way to accomplish two nice things at once:

1. You get to show your appreciation for someone whose help meant a lot to you.

2. You get to spread a few of their tips and techniques to a broader audience.

Perhaps you’ll even consider taking the further step of sending the person a thank you. Knowing how much you benefited from their support and instruction will, I imagine, bring a big smile to their face.