Essay 21 - I think this student is both smarter than me and on hallucinogenic drugs.
Essay 22 - More creative writing. I am very impressed with the quality of the student creative writing this semester. Except, in this case... well, see, they're supposed to be responding creatively to a particular text, and not so much in this case. So although it's a great piece they've written, it won't get the grade it would in a creative writing class. Alas, student.
Essay 23 - The exact opposite of 'The Waste Land and Me' - spotting all the right things, really knowing their stuff about poetic terminology, but it reads like they've been taught to write by catching a poem and drowning it in formaldehyde.
Essay 24 - This one has some excellent turns of phrase. They seem to seep out by accident (I get the feeling this student's learned to write the same way the writer of Essay 23 did), but they're great all the same.
Essay 25 - So good that my current choice of marking implement (metallic turquoise gel pen) seems to tarnish it somehow.
Essay 26 - ESL student doing a creative piece, where some of the ESL idiosyncrasies actually work surprisingly well.
Essay 27 - This one is really, really good, and the student's clearly done a lot of reading. The critics do swamp the student's own ideas a bit, as critics are wont to do, but we can work on that.
Essay 28 - I swear we went over the problems with 'many similarities and many differences' the week before these came in.
Essay 29 - Excellent ideas, somewhat lacking in execution. When even the Victorianist marking your essays thinks your sentences are unbearably long, you might want to work on knowing when to stop.
Essay 30 - Another good grade, another very similar registration number. (This is one of the main problems with anonymous marking, especially when you have a lot of essays to mark; seven-digit registration numbers that will quite often differ by only one digit pave a dangerous path into confusion and chaos when it comes to submitting grades.)
The exact opposite of 'The Waste Land and Me' - spotting all the right things, really knowing their stuff about poetic terminology, but it reads like they've been taught to write by catching a poem and drowning it in formaldehyde.
How else would they preserve it for dissection?
Hooray for essay 25!
"When even the Victorianist marking your essays thinks your sentences are unbearably long, you might want to work on knowing when to stop"
This might be my favourite sentence in this series of posts.
Scott, I hear Sparknotes has some captive-bred specimens...