Since the dawn of time, students have written craptastic essays. In this comment, I will discuss the three major ways that students write essays that are not interesting. First, there is the cliched opening sentence. Second, there is the lack of anything resembling a varied sentence structure. Third, there is the creation of words that do not exist. Sprinkled amid the real gems however, student papers also rely heavily on misplaced modifiers then there are the run on sentences of doom which continue on and on and on like the Energizer bunny commercials of course it is possible that in Canada you no longer see those commercials, and miss them (much like the student missed ample places to put a comma, but lo, no, we get an extra in the middle of a compound predicate.) In conclusion, I'm not sure what the schools are teaching to a student, but they really need to spend more time teaching them about essays, and apparently unclear pronoun references.
I'll stop now, but I feel your pain. I find it helps to perform dramatic readings of said papers to my girlfriend. She has not yet waded through reams of the things, and she gets quite properly indignant when they do stupid things.
My personal favorite was when her first reaction to a bad piece of work from last term was "Wow, that's not chauvinistic." Because, sadly, I have become so inured to the low grade sexism of 18 to 20 year old creative writers who think that shock value is good that I didn't even notice it on a conscious level.
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Date: 2007-01-03 04:33 am (UTC)I'll stop now, but I feel your pain. I find it helps to perform dramatic readings of said papers to my girlfriend. She has not yet waded through reams of the things, and she gets quite properly indignant when they do stupid things.
My personal favorite was when her first reaction to a bad piece of work from last term was "Wow, that's not chauvinistic." Because, sadly, I have become so inured to the low grade sexism of 18 to 20 year old creative writers who think that shock value is good that I didn't even notice it on a conscious level.