End Comments

Thank you for your paper.  The assignment required five pages of analysis of one of the texts we read this semester through the critical lens of your choice.  Your thesis is "Jane Austin is boring."  This well may be: I am unfamiliar with her work.  Jane Austen, on the other hand -- boring or not -- is worth analyzing.  I wish you had.  F.

I found your introduction absolutely amazing.  I didn't think so many sports metaphors, meaningless platitudes, and irrelevant "attention getters" could be crammed into such a short paragraph.  From "Have you ever tried to get a girl to notice you?" (Nope) to "Shakespeare takes it to the next level and leaves everything on the field" (level of what? field of where?  Agincourt?  But this isn't Henry V; it's Much Ado).  You have clearly given a hundred and ten percent, full heart, open eyes, what would Jesus read, and so on, and so forth.  D.


There are three typos in your first line.  You don't give a fuck.  Why should I?  I have now spent more time and thought on this comment than you did on the paper.  F.

You have quoted a sentence verbatim from the goddamned dictionary, without quotation marks.  Now I have to decide whether I should give you an F for plagiarism, or an F because it's the only sentence in the paper that is in what I recognize as a form of English.  The plagiarism F requires more forms.  You win.  F.

This is a really, really good paper.  It's insightful, intriguing, and fresh.  I've never read a more succinct but penetrating analysis of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  I would love to give it an A.  But we didn't read Portrait in this class, and asking around, I discover that my colleague Prof. Sniffles taught it last year.  And he concurred that this was an excellent paper, an opinion he has held ever since he gave your girlfriend an A for writing it.  Goddamn it.  Where's that form?  F.

Thank you for prefacing your excuse for your late paper with "I ain't gonna lie."  It's comforting to know that you think lying is so common and widely accepted that you deserve a goddamned medal for telling me that, this once at least, you're not going to do it.  I don't accept late papers.  Why not?  Because I'm sick of reading the goddamned things and every time a lazy little puke like you doesn't turn one in, that's another free twenty minutes I can spend watching old episodes of Frasier.  F.

I read your paper.  Then I ran it through the plagiarism checker, and Googled some random words and phrases.  I checked some old syllabi from colleagues in the syllabus database, to see if any of them have taught the same books recently.  I read your paper again, and searched for some new phrases, trying again to catch you in Google.  And then I realized.  You wrote this.  And it's good.  You actually read the books.  You analyzed them.  You formatted the paper correctly, and not only did you proofread -- you revised!  Really revised, for organization and clarity and argument.  How jaded am I, that when I see what ought to be my expectation, I assume that you cheated.  I'm ashamed of myself.  A.

I read your paper.  It looked familiar, so I flipped up through the stack.  Hey.  This last one I gave an A to . . . oh, son of a bitch.  Where's that form?