Friday, April 25, 2008

First Impressions

Get out your red pens. Here are the opening sentences for the last three papers I've graded for a course entitled Religions of the ancient Near East:

1. "Within every great epic story, exists a legendary hero and his/her journey to explore, seek adventure, and achieve greatness by means of overcoming struggles."
2. "In every culture, every religion, there are central characters that embodies the beliefs of it's people and reinforces the rituals and culture set forth."
3. "Zawi Hawass seems as obnoxious and petulant as the man who hawks OxiClean on late night commercials."

Number 3 wins.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

No way your student knows what petulant means.

Anonymous said...

Agreed. I don't even know the OxiClean commercial but I like that sentence.

Sue said...

#3 most definitely!! Unless of course s/he's parroting the professor's words ;-)

In which case, A+ for the professor!

Jaime said...

This is hilarious - I just read the comment out loud to someone who laughed as much as I did. I love clever papers!

Anonymous said...

For numbers 1 & 2, I normally cross out those sentences and write either "fluff" or "filler" next to them. Sentence number 3 is tough - you have to appreciate the lyricism of the student but in a formal paper? I'd probably write something like "hahaha, avoid colloquialisms".