Why the fuck are you reading his essay?

Quote from: Meta Cognition on September 13, 2016, 07:19:26 PM

Why the fuck are you reading his essay?

I have to peer review it for my English 101 course.

Tell him to pick another course.

Give it to him straight, but be friendly and politic. Select your words carefully. Nothing aggressive. He'll probably meet you halfway and want to improve. He probably, even if it's subconsciously, realises it's a bit shit.

Grab yourself a red pen and mark that fucker up. Every single mistake. Write little comments off to the side.

There is no harder strike to the ego than handing an English major an essay full of red ink.

^

Circle "not on what's my passion" several times over, enough to slightly scratch the paper, and put a little arrow pointing to "wtf dude???"

Good thing he's an English major; he needs some critical writing lessons.

I mean, yeah, that's a good point. If you're already good at writing, or you're at least confident in your skills, there's no real reason to even study the subject anymore other than to bolster your own ego. That's part of why I ultimately switched to CS--because I knew, at the end of the day, all I was doing was dicking around and flattering myself. That's English majors.

If you suck at writing, maybe it wouldn't hurt to take a few writing classes. English major? Maybe go for a minor--that's what I'm doing (mainly because I don't want all those credits to go to waste, but whatever).

OT:
Don't even think about telling this guy to change his major, by the way. The thing about liberal arts majors is that they're very emotional, and they take offense to any form of life advice. They take it as a form of persecution. Because what they do is their "passion," and they're not worried about money, etc. when, in reality, money will become a problem for them very shortly down the line, and if they don't have any marketable skills, things are gonna start looking pretty bleak for them.

But that's a conclusion they should come to on their own. You can't tell someone that what they're doing is a waste of time and money. It creates within them an attitude of defiance that they'll struggle to overcome. I did.

In his defense, the length minimum is way too long for this kind of essay, and our professor is being a real cunt about it. You'd think an English professor would recognize the problems with arbitrary length specifications.

yeah you have to be a really good bullshit artist. Be able to tie words into pretty but redundant bows and knots. Not everyone has that skill. That or be a super-applied and conscientiously interested student that can somehow fill the thing out with relevant rumination. bah, I dunno

Quote from: Verbatim on September 13, 2016, 07:24:46 PM

Grab yourself a red pen and mark that fucker up. Every single mistake. Write little comments off to the side.

There is no harder strike to the ego than handing an English major an essay full of red ink.

is there a universal system for correcting essays? With like a symbols key?

I don't think there's a universal standard, but he'll get the idea if you just keep it simple.

Circling misspelled words, fixing comma splices, etc. are simple enough, but if an entire sentence is incoherent or FUBAR, underline the entire thing, bring it to the side, and write something like "rephrase this" or "awkward."

In the event that a passage sounds nice or looks well-written (you're gonna want to find something that you like, by the way), a good thing to do is to write two vertical lines off to the side where the paragraph starts and ends, and write something like "this is good" or "I like this!"

Go into something where the money's at....
......

.....

...like teaching.

a good thing to do is to write two vertical lines off to the side where the paragraph starts and ends, and write something like "this is good" or "I like this!"

Use blue/green pen.

green pen.

what is this sorcery