Many students feel, upon getting a B grade, that they are
somehow just not good enough. They are above average, just not extraordinary.
Note the focus in those two sentences? The focus is on the author instead of on
the writing. Instructors are not grading the person. We are grading the
artifact turned in – a paper. We are looking to see if the paper has not only
the material we are asking for, and how the material is presented. We are
looking to see if the writer is actually interacting, intellectually, with the
material we have assigned them.
See if you can see how much this differs from the “D” and
“C” paper.
30 Days of Night,
directed by David Slade, shows what happens when bad vampires intersect with helpless
humans. That the vampires are intelligent is shown by them waiting until there
would be no daylight for the humans to use to escape, destroying all the
telephones as well as the cell tower, and destroying all the cars and killing
the sled dogs. Once the humans are cut off from civilization and help, the
vampires attack them a few at a time, in their homes and in the store, taking
care to kill the people after they’ve drank their fill. They kill the humans
because in this world being bitten by a vampire is all it takes to become one,
and the head vampire doesn’t want too many vampires since an increase in the
vampire population would call human attention to their existence, and vampires
are to be thought to not exist. The sheriff is the hero as he injects himself
with vampire blood to fight the lead vampire and save the few survivors. He
then has enough humanity left to commit suicide in his wife’s arms as the sun
comes up. I think it was a good movie.
Clearly this paragraph is better than the C level paragraph
in several ways. And the one “I” statement is a common throw-off I see in
student papers. They aren’t willing to just leave the paper to stand on its own
merits, but feel it necessary to add the one “me” statement.
- It discovers a topic or theme and attempts to find internal support from the source for it.
- The summary which is given all clearly supports the ideas under discussion.
- It gives a clear statement of what is being discussed – which the reader needs and the assignment called for.
- The grammar and sentence structures have all been proof-read and fixed.
So what went wrong? Why is it not an “A” response?
Because it tries to do too much. There are too many strands
of thought running through it – like a brainstorm with every possible topic
introduced. This is a very small assignment, but even a larger essay wouldn’t
want this many ideas. Let’s take a look:
- Vampires are evil
- Humans are helpless
- Vampires are intelligent: Internal proof – they destroy cars, phones, attack at night
- Vampires don’t like daylight
- Vampires should remain a story character, unreal
- A new vampire would be strong enough to kill an older vampire
- The sheriff is a hero: becomes a vampire to protect, loves his wife enough to not kill her, commit suicide rather than kill humans.
As you can see when they are broken out; there are a lot of
topics here. Any one of them would have been ample for a two-hundred word
paragraph. This is clearly much better than a C paper, but it tries to do too
much.
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