First Guest Post - In which a witch despairs at the work submitted by English students

 As you may be aware, the philosophy of rant night that of a shared airing of grievances. While we may not all have the exact same complaints (although I personally EXTREMELY relate to the following rant), we all share the common need to rant! Without further ado, I would like to present the first (hopefully of many) guest rant post! Enjoy!

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A guest post by Eponymous Bosh

Get ready for a pretentious diatribe on the quality of work presented by first year English students at university. As an English major who graduated with honours and distinction, I was told by a fellow student—to whom I had been nothing but pleasant—that I would make a scary professor. The one you don’t say hi to when you meet them in the hall outside of class. The one whose office door daunts you. The one who doesn’t have to dress up as a witch for Halloween, because guess what, they already are one. So here I am, living up to my diabolical potential the poor unfortunate souls whose first year English papers I happen to be marking. Prepare to be horrified, either by the papers or me.

It was all there, laid out in perfectly intelligent essay form: introduction with three-point thesis statement, succeeding three paragraphs illustrating the said three points with topic sentences and everything, and conclusion… well, that’s where it all went to pot. You can’t spend two pages explaining your criteria for good literature, using a piece that doesn’t follow said criteria as a negative example, and then finish by saying, “I’m not saying it’s a bad piece of literature,” because Ding! yes, you are. If you’re not, what was the point of the whole fracking paper? You just presented an argument, and then pulled the stuffing out of it by disagreeing with yourself! Not once, but twice! In the concluding paragraph: the place where you’re supposed to reinforce how convincing your whole paper was. What was the point of me reading the paper? Or of you writing it? Or of life?

But you know what, that’s okay. Because I don’t really care about these students’ opinions anyway. Particularly, when they tell me, ad nauseam, that it is, indeed, their own personal opinion that they’re expressing. Because I wouldn’t have guessed—without you ending one sentence with “in my opinion” and then starting the very next with “In my opinion,”—I wouldn’t have ever, in a million years, have guessed, that you might just be stating something that is in fact your opinion. Not the fact that your name is on the paper. Not that fact that you chose to write on this topic. Not even the fact that you’re making completely subjective statements as though they are universal truths. No, even then I might not have realised that you are actually relating a personal viewpoint without you telling me every sentence. For a second there I might have thought you were actually writing something with some external substantiation that I could potentially relate to or even agree with. Thanks for letting me know that is not the case and therefore I don’t have to give your paper any serious consideration.

Because how can I? I read what starts as a seemingly coherent paper, well-formatted, well-written, well-argued, and suddenly start feeling déjà vu. Haven’t I seen this point before? <scrolls up> Yeah, they used almost the same three sentences they used in the last paragraph, just switching out a couple of the words. Okay, make a comment about watching for redundancy and move on. It’s still a good pa—wait a minute. I’m not imagining this. <scrolls back up, back down, back up again> This intellectual giant just copied and pasted the same literal sentence into three separate paragraphs. Was your mother frightened by a parrot? And irony of ironies, the last paragraph was about how literature can use repetition to either good or bad effect in regard to reinforcing themes. Part of the assignment involved writing something that was intentionally bad and analyzing why, and how it compared to something the student considered good. Which opens up an incredible possibility: did this student also write an intentionally bad essay, demonstrating ineffective use of repetition, as some sort of meta? The answer to this excessively salty pondering is “no.” The student ran out of content halfway through the essay and had to make the word count by hook or by crook. Which is why they were the only one to actually write out how many words there were at the bottom of the essay to prove it was in range of the limit. Not too subtle.

And, I’m sorry, but saying that you have nothing to say about a piece—which you chose to analyze—does not “speak volumes” about its real or imagined qualities. Saying you have nothing to say, says as much as if you said nothing, which in a way you did, and that something it says is—nothing. Or perhaps it says, “I’m lazy and want the reader to infer and accept my views on this topic without me having to articulate or justify them.” Because that’s how convincing arguments work.

Also, just don’t begin a paragraph with “Since the beginning is the best place to start….” You’re not Fraulein Maria and I’m not one of seven children dressed in your old drapes having a mountaintop singalong.

Among the copious typos and grammatical errors, by far my favourite was a misspelling of literature as “Litturature.” I can’t think of a better one-word summary for most of these papers than that. They were terrifying.