*pause to rearrange blog layout, because that's going to get me through the marking faster, obviously*
Essay 31: They're a bitch to mark, but I'm loving these creative-writing essays.
Essay 32: That said, I wonder about students like this one, who can write like a Pulitzer-winning angel; are they going to be this good at writing analytic pieces as well? Aren't they going to feel a bit disappointed if they turn out not to be and their grades plummet once creative responses aren't an option?
Essay 33: Moral nuance: not a big thing in first-year essays.
Essay 34: Yeah, see, when I warned everybody off using 'they have many similarities and many differences' as an argument, I was not actually suggesting 'they have lots of similarities and only a few differences' as a replacement. Really.
Essay 35: This is an interesting one, because I think I know who wrote it and (for the sake of anonymous vagueness) they're a student whose pre-university background was in a profession which has the potential to be traumatic and harrowing in a variety of ways, and the student's chosen to write about that very thing. Effectively and well, so it's not awkward to mark. Just interesting.
Essay 36: Do not eat your thesaurus. It never helps.
Essay 37: I think this student did something really interesting without realising it, and then moved on to say eighteen varieties of the same thing about rhyme. I did a lot of underlining, and there may have been arrows.
Essay 38: This one answered the question I'd say is by far the toughest (although it's on the shortest texts, which might explain a lot about its popularity). Made some good points intermittently. There's a weird feeling with some of these and-now-I-will-proceed-to-discuss-imagery essays; I think a lot of the time these students actually quite like having opinions of their own about the text, but they've been trained to write in the kind of way that stamps down on that, and so it comes through in patches and bursts, as if there's some quietly-fought battle hiding under the type.
Essay 39: defied all rational description.
Essay 40: Brilliant ideas, very strange tangly structure. This can be fixed.
I think you're just terrific.