English 1301
Autumn, 2011
A Cafeteria Selection (mostly bitter herbs) of Comments –
Not Everything on the Menu Applies to Every Individual
1. Many of you work hard, come to class on time, labor attentively and creatively in class, demonstrate initiative in your work outside of class, access The Verb Sharpening Shop, and never make excuses; thus, very little of the following will apply to you. Give yourself that cliché’ pat-on-the-back and carry on as you began.
2. Remember the mission: you are preparing yourself to serve humanity as a professional. Thus, you have chosen to attend college as a small part of your professional development. In college and in one’s professional calling one orders from the adult menu, not the child’s. If you do not come to class and do not work you cannot possibly pass. In college, as in that famous real life, there is no concept of excused absence or unexcused absence. There is an almost Darwinian (and Mr. Darwin was an odious little man) cleanness about this – you miss; you get dropped. Asking the instructor to give you a pass in the matter of attendance is asking the instructor to judge your life events and take charge of your very being, and that won’t happen.
3. Last Wednesday five students chose to skip fifty minutes of writing lab. I confess to you that addressing this matter to college students never occurred to me. College students demonstrate initiative, maturity, and industry. If, in future, anyone skips writing lab, that person will be marked absent for the period. Please do not embarrass yourself with excuses.
4. This isn’t high school. The outstanding self-induced problem for some in our merry band of scholars is a lack of initiative. Indolence and passivity are of no use to you and are unworthy of you. You cannot succeed in college if all you do is come to class, sit, wait for instructions, wait for life to happen, and go home to die intellectually before the inanity of Dancing With the Flip this Khardassian Off the Island. I realize that much of modern culture is often predicated on passive entertainments instead of mental, artistic, or physical endeavor, but I hope that you, as an individual, will reject lassitude.
5. A college class --- this is not high school, remember - requires approximately three hours of work outside class for each hour in the room. This can vary, or course, but experience demonstrates the accuracy of this old saying. Computer access can actually minimize outside work time; you no longer need to walk, drive, or bicycle to the library; the library comes to you via the magic of electrons. A room of your own with a table, a lamp, a computer, and respect from the household or dorm for your need to work is certainly desirable, if not always possible, but your out-of-class study arrangements are your challenge. Further, you must learn to work in the bits of time available to you throughout your day. Between classes I see students drooling over cell ‘phones, zombie-ing before the television in the student commons, and sometimes apparently accomplishing nothing but respirations. You must show initiative, open the notebook, and advance over (metaphorical0 broken ground to achieve your very real goal of an ‘A’ on your next test or project. I’ll be brutally honest: if you claim that you cannot work in isolated bits of time you are making excuses to yourself. You certainly use fragments of our solar calendar for television, idling on MeMeMeSpaceBookMe, viewing gossip on the ‘net, and indulging in vapid socialization. If, for instance, you watch any television at all then you do have time; what you do not have is an excuse for not building yourself an ‘A’ (no one receives an ‘A’) in any endeavor.
And now, let’s get back to work:
6. Most of the descriptive essays were perfectly awful. If your essay was not an adequate effort, deal with the problem – which, after all, is your problem -- with maturity and professionalism: with work. Sighing, eye-rolling, and associated dramatics are so, so MyBookFaceSpace adolescent, and accomplish nothing in your professional development. Look beyond the grade, read carefully the forest of red marks, and “consider the sure ways” (“The Seafarer”) of constructing better work in the future.
7. Almost every essay featured a perfectly workable thesis. The failure appears usually to have been rooted in a lack of effort. Some of the final drafts reflected no change from the rough draft – why? What did you think that long and yawn-inducing class session on reading and bleeding rough drafts was for?
8. If your friend received a better grade than you did, it’s only because I like that person better than I like you. Now that we’ve established that, we can carry on.
9. Weak verbs: You have never gone anywhere in your life. You do not go anywhere now. As a child you were carried, and later you strolled, sauntered, hiked, biked, pedaled, rode, drove, motored, flew, jogged, and rushed. But you did not go. Other weak verbs include variations on “have” and the overuse of state-of-being verbs.
10. Weak nouns. You have never eaten food in your life. There is no such thing as food. You have, however, gulped, sipped, swallowed, chewed, gobbled, munched, or gnawed soup, hamburgers, corn, nachos, tacos, beans, sandwiches, and other sorts of comestibles.
11. Red ink – no one enjoys seeing red ink on a project. Deal with it; the red ink is for your professional development, not for your feelings. Red ink is not a judgment on you (the paper, however, may be subject to thirty days incarceration without the option of early release). The amount of red ink does not connect with the quality of the work; many excellent ‘A’ papers are festooned with much blood-like ink because they are worth of extra commentary and praise. ‘F’ papers are often less marked because they are so terrible that detailed commentary would be rather like repairing a leaky porthole on the Titanic.
12. Comparing grades – don’t do it. When someone asks your grade, clutch your paper selfishly and cruelly to yourself and advise your interrogator that your work is its own satisfaction (or some such blather). If he persists, tell him to tend to his own knitting. Similarly, don’t ask others about their grades – some things really aren’t your concern, nosey.
13. Commas and semi-colons – please review the use of these in that nice little book you bought for the course. That is the sort of thing the book is for, after all. Punctuation marks are not to be scattered about your work as if they were bacon bits on a pizza.
14. Don’t blame the computer for anything. I, for instance, have no idea why this Microsoft Word ’07 insists on pushing five spaces after a double numeral when I want only one. If I were turning this in for a grade, I’d certainly resolve the problem before sunrise.
15. MLA essay format – fix it. Fix it now. See #14, above. The use of a format is not to suppress your MyFaceSpaceBookMeMeMe specialness, but to help you write professionally in your career. There are numerous formats – MLA, APA, Chicago Manual of Style, and others – and if you learn any one of them you will easily adapt to any other.
16. “Even” – just what does this word mean when you use it?
17. “Just” – just (ahem!) what does this word mean when you use it?
18. Hyperbole – look it up. “Amazing” is one example of a perfectly innocent word frequently misused. When the apostles saw the open tomb, they were amazed. When they saw a lovely sunset, they may have been delighted but they were not amazed. Hyperbole can be useful, but it should not be employed for ordinary events.
19. “It.” I have been “it”ed (that’s not a real word) nigh unto death (that’s hyperbole). Mind the pronouns. A pronoun must always have an antecedent.
20. Cliches’ and filler language:
“spending time together”
“just being with my family”
“run like a champ”
“most wonderful place in the world”
“typical Southeast Texas shrubbery”
“We’ve had good times as well as bad times”
“Lo and behold”
And other Tower-of-Babel / Babble offenses. You know who you are. Hang your heads in abject shame. Repent with sackcloth and ashes, ashes from burnt copies of Fowler’s Modern English Usage.
21. Sentences – Write complete sentences. We tend to speak in fragments in informal discourse, but in writing we complete the thought in a complete sentence with a subject (noun or pronoun), a verb (which carries the action), and, usually, an object (a noun or pronoun which receives the action). An example: “Sven (subject) smacked (verb) Pierre (object).” An example of a complete sentence without an object: “Pierre (subject) wept (verb).” This is rudimentary; upon the S-V-O and S-V structures we construct an architecture of adjectives, adverbs, dependent clauses, and other sorrows.
22. Catalogues of adjectives – one of your classmates set out six adjectives before a noun. The record is seven. K.I.S.S.
23. “From the heart” is no excuse for shabby work. You surely don’t want a surgeon who operates from the heart, but rather one who works with skill, knowledge, and professionalism to save your life. He also should not arrive in surgery late, slobbering on a soda and crunching on potato chips, and complaining that the dying patient and the professional staff of anesthesiologists, nurses, and technicians must understand that he has a life outside of the hospital.
24. Parallelism – sequenced items should be constructed grammatically similar. Instead of “red, white, and the other color is blue,” write “red, white, and blue.”
25. Nouns and pronouns must agree in person and number. One person or item cannot be “they.”
26. “Would” – this helping verb is almost never used in simple past tense. If you are about to write “would,” think very carefully about why you are writing this word in this place in this sentence.
27. End stops and direct quotations – periods, question marks, and exclamation marks are end stops; they end – or stop - a sentence. In American usage the end stop is placed within quotation marks, which is usually illogical. In Oxford usage (which the rest of the English-speaking world employs), the end stop often falls outside the quotation marks. Either usage is fine for this course, but be consistent. In your career, follow your company’s style manual.
28. I am not going to patronize you (“patronize” in this context means to talk down to). I am not interested in your specialness; I am interested in your good writing. When you write well I’m going to say so, and if – if – you babble clichés, filler language, hyperbole, and platitudes in a confused tangle of incoherent paragraphs and botched sentences, I’m going to point that out too.
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