I was up early this morning, grading student essays, and I caught the end of a television program where the evangelist talked about how God has numbered, and tracks, the individual hairs on our heads. If this is the case, there are more to sort on my pillow than there are anywhere else. What I do not pull out seems simply to fall out.
I find essays disheartening. My expectations are so high, and it is clear that some students fail to put in adequate effort. Too often, I read summaries of class notes, declarations that have little to do with the actual questions asked. When I first started teaching, I remember agonizing over whether to assign one essay a “C” or a “C+.” I cringed a little when I returned it, only to overhear the student afterwards: “Cool! I passed!”
We have motivated majors, students who pass through on the way to law school, but many of our best students are training to be teachers, teachers who might never have to touch on the full significance of analysis in our field. As I wrote here, recently, it is great when all the strands of these analyses come together at the end of the term, but too infrequently does this translate to the essay page. There is a disconnection between their interesting ideas and their writing exercises. Perhaps essays bear too little resemblance to the lectures they, too, will soon undertake.
There are two minor errors that I see all the time, little pet peeves that are indicative of larger weaknesses: the first is the use of “scare” quotation marks, as I just invoked, and the second is a reliance on unintegrated quotations.
Perhaps we suffer in the age of hypertext, but I suspect it runs deeper than that. When students get to a point in a sentence where they wish to emphasize something, I mean really ‘emphasize’ something, they will often put a word or two in single quotation marks, to differentiate this from actual quoted material. As I told them last week, as single quotations marks are reserved (in North America) for quotations within quotations, they might as well set off their emphases with four strokes, as with just one or two. Why does this bother me? The frequency of this utility makes it seem quite lazy; I suspect that if they could put things in a different color and underline them three or four times, they would. The truth is that a properly constructed sentence, within a properly framed argument, should draw attention to itself. It does not need bells and whistles.
I have weaned my students from overusing the long, block quotation by exaggerating and telling them that I never read these passages. But instead of sewing a quotation into a proper, grammatical sentence, I will often find, in the middle of a paragraph of student prose, a sentence belonging to another, usually properly cited but without a tag. It is as if those words were cut and pasted out of a secondary source and into a student’s argument. It does not belong; it sticks out like a sore thumb. Instead of an argument that asserts something, brings in an example, draws a conclusion, and relies then on an authority to reinforce that conclusion, I am supposed to interpret the presence of the words of someone else as a justification for what the student says. It is as if they stand to the side, point to the authority and say to me: “See? What did I tell you?”
Some mistakes are simply explained away as a lack of concentration, too little attention to detail. Students will, in a list of works cited, fail to refer to the same kind of material properly, twice in a row. But some mistakes, I think, tell us a little more about their intentions when they write. And these errors remind me that we all have a long way yet to go.
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