This is part 2 of the series on how to make better grades in writing classes.
The C paper:
College students, my own young friends included, get really
angry when they get a C grade. They seem to forget that a C means that the
paper they have written, not they themselves, is average.
“What makes a paper average?” you ask.
There are a whole slew of issues which can render a paper
“average,” up to having the bad luck of having registered in a class where
almost all the writers write better through better word choice, descriptors
used, and better grammar and syntax. In comparison to the papers the teacher is
reading from every other student, this particular paper just doesn’t jump as
high.
Take a look at this
example:
The movie 30 days of
night came out in 2007 and it was shot mostly in Australia. It was a scary
movie. It begins with a group of vampires walking into an Alaska village as
night falls. They are not nice vampires as compared to those in twilight. I
liked twilight better. The vampires walk run though the village killing
everyone they meet, dragging them out of their homes, and they kill the dogs
and destroy the cell tower so no one can call for help. The vampires can only
be killed by being beheaded. An ax works good. The sheriff and his wife are the
major characters fighting against the vampire and trying to save the town
people. They rescue a few people and go
hide in an oil factory. Almost at the end, when the vampires are going to blow
up the whole town, and the people hiding in the factory will be killed in the
explosion, the sheriff injects himself with some vampire blood to make himself
a vampire. I thought that was sorta
romantic. That he loved his wife enough to become a vampire to save her.
Anyway, it ends with the now vampire sheriff fighting the boss vampire and
beating him. The vampires just leave. He dies by turning to dust in his wife’s
arms as the sun comes. (224 words)
As you will see, this response is much better than the “D”
response. It does a lot right. Just not quite the “right” things the instructor
is looking for in an “A” or “B” paper. Again, the response grade response is
cumulative:
- The paragraph begins by naming the title, just not quite correctly. In the Humanities, the standard is that movie titles are italicized. And the same letters should be capitalized as on the original title. Thus:30 Days of Night
- It fails to list the director – which is easily findable online, and who doesn’t have access to online resources?
- It is a straight summary of the movie, pretty much. This happened, then this happened, then this happened. There is no independent thought occurring here. While summary might get you though high-school, think about the real world. Would you want a Doctor unable to progress beyond summarizing the symptoms?
- There is no personalization, no angle which interested the student more than any other.
- I might forgive one “I” statement and not knock this attempt back to “D” level, but it certainly would keep it from climbing to a “B” level.
- It provides extraneous information which was not asked for. This reads as page filler not as enthusiasm given the lack of the director name. If the writer was online to discover when and where, why not by who?
As a whole, any one of these parts will not knock the paper back
to a “D” grade, but it certainly will keep the instructor from raising it
to a “B” paper. In college, instructors
want thought, but they don’t want “I think” said, ever. One says, “It can be
argued…” “Some people might read this as…”
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