Hum disappoints me greatly
Feb. 19th, 2006 05:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoyWell, that was true from the start, but here's yet another way... so our Hum teacher has posted online two "model papers" from last year for the same essay we've been assigned. I just looked at them.
I can't deny that they're well written, but in the writing seminar and in class they've been going on about how we have to have a significant thesis. What did these papers say? "DuBois says this [something obvious], and this is how he says it." No shit he says that! Now, last I checked, a significant thesis means a nonobvious implication of the text, something not everyone would notice when they read it. This means not something stated almost directly in the text, but an implication that comes out of putting together different (probably apparently unrelated and spatially separated) sections of the text. Or perhaps it comes of finding an alternative reading for some sentence, most especially an alternative meaning for some metaphor (or sometimes of deliberately overextending a metaphor :) ). It's not, "These are the literary devices the author employs to say what he so obviously says." It's finding something the author says that he doesn't even know he's saying. *That's* what's supposed to make writing these things hard!
On my last essay, I got many comments from the teacher saying, "Why does the reader care?" That applies so much more to these two papers. My claim was at least partly nonobvious.
...will I stoop to writing a paper like these two because I've not yet come up with anything better? Quite possibly.
-Sniffnoy
In other news, because I have to mention this sometime, Jack is actually going to enter a real Smash tournament. Pretty neat.
I can't deny that they're well written, but in the writing seminar and in class they've been going on about how we have to have a significant thesis. What did these papers say? "DuBois says this [something obvious], and this is how he says it." No shit he says that! Now, last I checked, a significant thesis means a nonobvious implication of the text, something not everyone would notice when they read it. This means not something stated almost directly in the text, but an implication that comes out of putting together different (probably apparently unrelated and spatially separated) sections of the text. Or perhaps it comes of finding an alternative reading for some sentence, most especially an alternative meaning for some metaphor (or sometimes of deliberately overextending a metaphor :) ). It's not, "These are the literary devices the author employs to say what he so obviously says." It's finding something the author says that he doesn't even know he's saying. *That's* what's supposed to make writing these things hard!
On my last essay, I got many comments from the teacher saying, "Why does the reader care?" That applies so much more to these two papers. My claim was at least partly nonobvious.
...will I stoop to writing a paper like these two because I've not yet come up with anything better? Quite possibly.
-Sniffnoy
In other news, because I have to mention this sometime, Jack is actually going to enter a real Smash tournament. Pretty neat.
