A shift of perspective.

[icarus]

On the table for discussion: One Shakespeare essay.

My (unspoken) opinion of said essay: dry as dussssssst, uninsightful, dull, pedestrian, and ponderous in style.

Teacher's opinion of said essay: solid, well-argued thesis, strong conclusion, in need of only some fine-tuning to clarify my terms but essentially ready for prime time.

Whose opinion counts?

Yeah, thank goodness. I take it these literary bricks are normal in the field.



P.S. She didn't notice that I cited The Onion, and only felt my Robin Williams quote needed to integrated better (heh, since I threw it in in a fit of madness).

Comments

[cyanei.livejournal.com]

AHAHA I love that you are the kind of person who quotes The Onion and Robin Williams in a Shakespeare paper.

[enname.livejournal.com]

Having just finished marking a half million essays I can truthfully say that they are common. It is at least nice to find one that is well argued, logical and concluded. Versus the dry as dust, pedestrian and ponderous ones which are also badly written, illogical and lacking in argument. :P

I regularily quote Blackadder, Sir Humphrey Appleby (Yes Minister) and Monty Python in my essays and don't get flak unless it is used clumsily. Now I gotta use The Onion as well, because that is just a neat idea!

[hilarita.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, my thesis supervisor made me go through and take out all the exciting bits, so it was terminally dull. So yes, it's perfectly normal, just depressing. It's also a conspiracy to keep the interested amateur out by making them fall asleep through sheer boredom on the first page.

[ev-vy.livejournal.com]

LOL! Well, the last essay I wrote for my studies got a comment: 'It's a thinking paper'. And I got extra points for bibliography (sic!). And it took me about three hours to write it. The essay was graded by a titled university professor.

[harveywallbang.livejournal.com]

oh! in high school, we had the most worthless teacher ever. we noticed that he barely even read over what we wrote as our answers to the questions, so we started having fun. it was geosystems class. one of my answers, if i recall was "because the tuxedo black rock layer and the flamingo pink".. i had funny-named permanent markers. other answers to questions were "because i said so" and "your face" so on. i got 10/10's on all of em..
not quite the same situation, but still...