Hits A Nerve

via Brian Micklethwait

"The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature."

Boy, that says it all. I will say flat out that my blog entries are generally just strings of thoughts, not essays. But this article is dead on. Of the classes I had in high school, very few outside of English had so much as a "long answer" portion of an exam, and no essays. English had the "long answer" and fairly regular 2.5 page essays. And yes, it was symbolism, themes, etc. And of course we were taught writing such that any sane person would have fallen asleep halfway through the first page. I think what agitated me most was the complete lack of objective criteria for, say, an average score. Assuming perfect grammar, punctuation, and proper organization, and a certain range of relevant facts that must be explained to a certain level of detail, I would have liked to have passed more. This was English, though. That was also the only research paper I had to write (1 per year). I did a little better on these since I was allowed to form my own conclusions and explain my own facts rather than regurgitate "facts" about literature learned from my English teacher.

Anyhow, I could bitch about that worthless English teacher for years. Frankly, the only useful stuff I got from him was the proper MLA formats and rules. The typing and computer class was of much greater value. As Scott Adams said once, I'm Typing Right Now.

Back then, I would have like to never do another research paper (8-12 pages) or 2.5 page essay ever again. Boy was I in for it! Nowadays I can spit out 2.5 pages without taxing a neuron, mostly due to lack of focus in my writing. But research papers... Lord. My degree is in Political Science. This involved, as you may imagine, quite a few Political Science classes, only the first three of which did NOT require a 12-15 page research paper. I believe I did three of these in one semester, and no fewer than 2 a semester in my last couple of years. I did one for a sociology class, my stupid English Composition class (just as left-wing as you've heard, even at Texas A&M), and probably a couple more here and there. Hell, I got good at it. I could use the 3270 terminal with my network account (Internet access, still largely in the public, university, and incredibly wealthy company domain at the time) to the library card catalog to find sources (including location), go and check them out or make copies, locate citations, and write the paper in a day or so. The Internet made this easier--not for cheating, but for finding sources without having to go to the library. PolySci professors were, shall we say, flexible about formatting--whereas in high school every period, comma, and tab was accounted for, more than once we had to pin the professor down on what he was looking for. And I daresay we all stuck with the MLA standards.

I'm glad I did that, and wish I had done it more in high school. It would have sucked, but you know, you can work your way up to 12-15 pages. Hell, how about 5 pages and minimum 3 sources? Dunno. There's a way to do it, but these things are hard to grade and even harder to nail down cheating these days.