I assign a fair bit of writing in my courses, but because it’s all about biology, the papers I get back might be full of cryptic words like mek and src and neoplasia, but they tend to have a straightforward narrative and avoid ambiguity…and since I’m at a good liberal arts college, most of the students are competent writers. But then every once in a while I get a glimpse from my colleagues of the world outside my mechanistic and straightforward world, and I feel a small thrill of horror. You should read the whole student essay, but here’s the concluding paragraph.
Because knowing what it knows now, it will never know peace. It will only know humiliation. For there are no limits on the number of Grade Change forms I can request, or if there are, I plan to collect them like an ignorant naturalist on a well-trodden shore and submit them in perpetuity.
Yeesh. The tortured syntax, the ambiguous referents, the vague threat of drowning the poor victim in paperwork…I do not want to live in that universe.
But still, this one is still the all-time champion worst.
…Oh for crying out loud, there are only two commas in the entire piece, and they’re both in the first paragraph.
My mental voice pronounced it all in an incredible monotone.
See, it’s those kinds of minds that could lead us in a brave new direction, if we just didn’t hate the religious.
Put that man into ID science right now!
Glen Davidson
Indeed, pretty bad but unfortunately, it has no memorable line (or lines) that you could quote later on, such as- “a virgin forest is where the hand of man has never set foot” or “Emperor Nero, by his own efforts increased the population of Rome by forty-thousand.”
What a wonderful word.
Definition of ACEPHALOUS
1
: lacking a head or having the head reduced
2
: lacking a governing head or chief
Origin of ACEPHALOUS
Greek akephalos, from a- + kephalē head — more at cephalic
First Known Use: circa 1731
Wow, the reminds me of something I heard on NPR the other night. An essayist was trying to justify completely distorting the facts of a real life event that involved the death of a child “to improve the artistic quality of the piece” This is why I never approach the non-science parts of campus unless I have to.
Oh dear;
Are they now? If his math and engineering skills are as lacking as his language skills, I do not suppose that he could displace the Earth’s moon from its orbit on his best day. As an aside, how many moons does he suppose we have?
Of course, I don’t mean to be “an insult Montaigne.”
http://bulwer-lytton.com/
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
–Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2011.htm
“Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.”
What’d I ever do to you!
Was your monotone stilted and uncertain, as mine was?
Why is that? Does our ‘mind’s ear’ try to match the competency of the writer with an orator of comparable skill?
Wow, there has never been a student complaint as stupid as the last one and there never will. It is a student complaint distilled to its very essence.
Is that part about “Because knowing what it knows now, it will never know peace. It will only know humiliation,” a reference to the killer in the silence of the lambs who murdered people for their skins? Because that would be seriously creepy. Or is it a reference to something else? Or is it just an attempt to dehumanize the teacher?
I spent a few years teaching a freshman humanities class that was writing-intensive. I have seen things. Bad things.
That’s awful. I thought it was bad when my students constantly write about laboratory “glasswear”.
You would think trolling the professor would be an automatic F. Seriously – gibberish much?
Two things:
1. Is an insult Montaigne like an insult comic, only more pretentious?
2. You have made me uncomfortable with your words and what you say. I insist, nay, demand satisfaction! With my words and what I say!
I think it’s like Triumph the comic insult dog, except instead of a dog puppet… Well you get the idea.
“That was a great essay… Que sais-je?!“
I am appalled not only with the student essay, but with the professor’s responses in the commentary. “Hoards” instead of “Hordes”, “to” instead of “too”, a sentence with two apparent objects (“it”, “David”), …
I never taught English or composition, but I would at least make an effort not to embarrass myself.
this is that famous “university” in Lubbock, right?
because if not, I demand my PhD in English right fucking now.
blockquote>First, my professor told me to write a paragraph like a hamburger. Can you believe that?
Perhaps that is why all your sentences read like they’ve been through a meat grinder.
Perhaps that is why all your sentences read like they’ve been through a meat grinder.
quite so
That’s nothing.
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine.
A rotten, dead, sideways porcupine.
For I teach in the Texas State System.
It’s amazing to contemplate the lengths to which students will go to improve their grades. My favorite story about this concerns a former colleague (a gay man) at a major midwestern state university who had the following exchange with a very comely female student:
Student: Professor [Blank], I’d do anything for an A.
Professor: Anything?
Student: Yes, anything.
Professor: Really, anything?
Student, Yes, anything!
Professor: Anything at all?
Student: Yes, anything at all!
Professor: Like . . . study?
Hmmm….
Might want to rephrase that.
And they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn’t bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it’s not okay because if they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire…
It would have been even better if you’d left out the commas . . .
Damn.
These are actually worse than my fire stories. Or my steam ramblings.
Man, that last link is adorable. Now I have a cramp between my eyes. Dare I suggest that some people aren’t suited to education?
Yet accomodationists still insist that its uncouth to point out the presence of stupidity, even when the stupids want to run the whole show and run everyone’s lives?
It wouldn’t be nice for anyone to point out that the student in that link is “a religious man”, would it? It would be grossly unfair and irrelevant. It would be a cheap shot that might foster the impression one is implying a correlation between religious conviction and stupidity, wouldn’t it?
I was going to point out the link between religion and feeling victimized, but the words of it disturb me so much I can not due to the fact of it causes a distress of making me uncomfortable in this regarding my approach to the details of which you impress upon me in not knowing the topic enough to take it upon your inconvenience.
Oh to be once again back on that cusp of maturity as so many of us might remember, and wanting so desperately to be taken seriously by everybody (understandable living in a competitive world where those who are not taken seriously are so often pushed further back at the trough), which unfortunately translates for most people at that age into acting out in the most flagrantly pretentious and self-promoting way possible. It is not a time when content and clarity is what is really thought to be most impressive to other people (including professors ironically)…
I do love the second one, really, as the student whines about having to learn to read and write in college, insisting that he’s already learned that while failing completely to understand that in college it is expected that they learn to read and write CRITICALLY. His letter offered no points, provided nothing specific (“his words made me uncomfortable” seriously? That’s it?), and possessed virtually nothing that would propose a reasonable change to his grade and to the professor’s instruction style. Just a long repitative, substanceless whine loaded with undefended assertions of unfairness and unappreciation of his ‘genius’. In short, awesome fail. But, hopefully, if these students continue their education, taking both the praises and criticisms earnestly and in stride, the wonderful experience of college will surely work it’s magic in making them complete and mature beings worthy of honest respect. And at least capable of writing meaningful papers…
Ya know, I teach first year composition, and I LIKE the first essay. I mean, yeah it’s not the best written thing that I’ve ever read, but it CRITIQUES THE ASSIGNMENT. It uses outside sources. It structures the essay by using the source (Montaigne) and a continual example. It’s [kinda] witty. It even (mostly) fulfills the assignment, which was to rhetorically analyze a text from the class…
~Fabulous.~