Making the Grade: Writing Papers that Earn an "A" (the D Paper)

Making the Grade: Writing Vampire Papers

Grades. We all work for them, and all want to believe that without any effort on our own part, we will earn high grades in every field we endeavor to enter. Unfortunately, for most of us, it takes practice, practice, practice, AND … work

So what is the hidden code that makes one student paper an “A” paper while the next student paper – for a student who has written from the exact same prompt – garners only the dreaded “C,” and the student learns their work is really only av…er…a ge?

The answer really isn’t effort since a “C” student often works longer and harder than the “A” student. They just haven’t learned, yet, how to write to the instructor’s unwritten expectations. And often, sadly, refuse to actually read the damn texts which would teach them the specific skills they need, and inform them of the specific expectations. Not even if the material was written by the instructor of the course they are in, and can be expected to have relevant samples.

That said (rant ended), what exactly makes one response an A response and another a D response?

Let’s take a look at one of my assignments, worth four points towards a total of 190.

Write a short, think around 200 words – one paragraph -- convincing me you have indeed watched 30 Days of Night.  Be detailed, AND remember to mention director and film title.

Inasmuch as I tell my students exactly what garners an F: they get a list of issues, let’s work upwards from a D response. (Each student response is followed by where it has failed. I have fixed some of the typical grammar issues, and left other common ones.)

 ****

D Student: I watched the movie and I really didn’t like it. it was too dark for me to see what was happening half the time, and my boyfriend kept interrupting me and telling me it was too dark. I dont know why the people in the town didnt just leave, after all, there are roads, arne’t there? And why didn’t they fight back. If a vamire attatcked my house i would fight back. Alaska is cold. I disliked the movie because it was set there. And I really like vampires who are nicer to people and who dont go around trying to kill them. “30 days of night’ is a really terrible film because the vampires are mean. The point where the mean vampire tells the girl that there is no god, made me mad. It made me afraid to slep in the dark. To repeat myself, I really din’t like the movie.

Why is this bad? Can you come up with a list of mistakes? Note that it is a combination of badness that garners a “D” grade.

• It focuses solely on the reader and not at all on the film under discussion.
• The word “I” appears seven times in one-hundred thirty-five words. The word “I” in a college-level response is always problematical. “Why?” you ask. Because we want the focus to be on the item under discussion (and are uninterested in discussing you).  This is one reason why students should not use first person pronouns – in any form – in their formal responses. The viewer, the reader, people, a person, John Doe are all good alternatives which not only tell your instructor you are focusing outside your own reactions, but it forces you to format your response formally. And anything turned into an instructor for a grade: Formal. Dress it for Prom.
• Capitalization is broken in major ways. “I” is always capital – something taught way back when in elementary school. To lower-case it in a formal paper turned in to an instructor goes beyond rude. It is student grade suicide. First lines always begin with a capital letter – again, student grade suicide.
• There is little internal evidence at all that the movie was actually watched.
• dont?  Really? Can’t even see the red-underline and right click to get the correct apostrophe?
• It isn’t long enough – for which this reader would be very, very grateful. Would you want this to go on any longer?
• All too often, a D paper has all sorts of off-topic information. And runs looong.
• The basic sentence structures and punctuations are wonky.

All-together, wouldn’t you be happy this ended? The only reason this garnered a “D” with points instead of an “F” is the one line which does contain one small bit of evidence from inside the film, and unmentioned in most reviews – the “no God” comment.

So that is what the teacher sees when reading the D paper. While most D papers might not be quite so dreadful, a fair amount of what crosses my desk looks like it.

Metaphoric Reality

Oregon Lottery Poster 2014

Sucking blood from a stone?

Over the past several years I have been musing upon the usage of metaphors. They inundate our daily life: rain = sorrow, a rose = love, a wedding ring = eternal love, and yes, I could continue for a very long time; I possess a (economically useless) Masters in English Literature. The question for the day is if the constant, longstanding use of a metaphor -- such as that of a blood-sucking vampire -- as a stand-in for a regular Jane/Joe human behaving in a way which denudes the impacted "victim"-- somehow waters down the original word / idea / entity.

The secondary question would be, if the word "vampire" as metaphor does indeed water down the idea/word/entity, why would it matter? Science tells us, empirically, that real undead, revivified, returned to life vampires do not exist.

Certainly a wide field of literature and media play with this willful assumption of disbelief. Most notably (if my memory serves), Bram Stoker had Helsing argue in Dracula that the most effective way to hide ones existence was to make people believe you are fiction. I do not think he took it the concept far enough. Far to say one is hiding ones existence is still to posit that one exists.

 I have thought, for a fair length of time as I've worked on the idea of vampire as a metaphor, that the best way to hide ones existence it to water it down, to make the very idea of ones existence so used as an everyday noun/verb that it no longer refers to anything specific. The noun "vampire" becomes synonymous with any person sucking the life -- economically, physically, or emotionally -- from another person. 

They are behaving "vampirically" (adverb describing a verb). And if any Joe/Jane can be a metaphoric vampire; pouf goes any concept whatsoever that these fictional beings might actually share the earth with us for we are all, at one time or another, vampires ourselves.

I will pause to reassure anyone who happens upon this post -- I am not positing the existence of the real creature. Nor do I discount it. I am just noting that one function of a cliche is to water down the power of the idea being cliched. Let's look at an almost useless, but very societally meaningful, cliche: The dark and stormy night. Does the rendering of the concept into an overused, almost meaningless cliche actually water down, make less valid -- less real -- the torrential downpour pushed by high winds that the cliche represents?I do suggest that the overuse of the metaphor is rendering it a cliche with a check-list attached, and that the overuse of the metaphor waters down the original in our collective consciousness. We humanize our concept of the vampire, taming them in our minds, and then use it as a pejorative name for each other.

What do you think? Does overuse of a metaphor water down the reality of the vampire?

Attractive Nuisance or Dehumanized Predatory Vampire

Sweet Goth has been lucky enough to get to vamp out every Tuesday night with a group of like-minded students. We have been looking at the representation of child vampires (and the motif occurs with all ages of vampire in literature) as they morph from human into vampire. In the Claudia section of Interview with a Vampire -- the film -- she changes from a scruffy human child into a beautiful child vampire. I never really wondered about the function of this oft-depicted change, writing it off as just offering the vampire better access to food sources (prey).  Then one of my students' speculated that this alteration in appearance, this metamorphosis, could function as a de-humanizing moment, marking the transition from living human to undead human. It was a good catch on the student's part, and one that bears considering. (Perhaps my next conference paper?)

Of course, there is nothing to say that both could not be occurring -- access to prey and dehumanization. We see these "make-overs" all the time on television as a "sow's ear" gets turned into a "silks purse" as the Cinderella sheds her old tattered and torn clothing and changes into a bright shining gown fit for the handsome prince and the ball. This metaphor is of course flawed since it likens the living human to a "sow's ear" and the newly emerged vampire into the "silk purse."  And attractive folks do get preferential treatment in society -- you know, the 4 doesn't go out with the 10 sort of treatment. As a vampire, I'd like to move closer to a 10.

Then randomly throw in the even more modern vampire representation in which one is stuck with the body one "died" in. And toss in the newish MTV series Teen Wolf where new-made werewolves not only are healed of any preexisting illnesses but are turned into 10's, and one sees the werewolf genre appropriating the idea even as the vampire genre releases it.

So this week I am offering no answers, just a pool of sort of random observations, and ask, are vampires an attractive nuisance (like a dangerous swimming pool in the neighbor's back yard), or is this "death" and "rebirth" a representation of dehumanization?

Picture from Wikipedia "Barnabas Collins" Page

At a conference recently, the conversation turned to a discussion of vampire fans. I have been thinking about the idea since then; asking myself the question: Is is creepy if I, and older female, ogle the young "vampire" characters trotting across my small screen?

 I remember when Dark Shadows arrived on our small black and white television (the picture was delivered in black and white for those of you who have never experienced it). All of us very young girls were "in love" with Barnabas Collins. He was the topic of lunch conversation, and the bane of teachers who had to endure the continued whispers about him in class. We giggled over him as he suffered the angst of having been made a vampire through a curse cast upon him; he did not choose to become one. He did not choose eternal blood-sucking, undead life.

For many of us, if not most, it was our first real experience with a vampire (discounting the vamping of Bella Lugosi's Dracula which was the stuff of Halloween costumes, and the vampires of Abbot and Costello).

Did you note above that I said that we were in love with Barnabas Collin? We KNEW that he was a character, an actor pretending to be a vampire. We were hot (well, as hot as elementary girls could be) about the character -- I doubt many of us were attracted to the actor himself. I will grant that given the age difference between a post-pubescent child and the actor, our fandom had elements of creep even when not considering that our real attraction was to the character of a couple-of-hundred year old vampire. But our gaze, our fan-mentality, saw the power and attraction of the character.

I am not sure, and this is true speculation and my thoughts are ongoing, but I have to wonder if the issue is less the age of the person gazing at the character (remembering that the actor playing Barnabas was Johnathan Frith who was certainly waaaayyyy older than much of his fanbase), and more about fans who fail to understand that the actor is not the character -- and then behave towards the actor inappropriately? Does "reality TV" have anything to do with our cultural loss of the separation of actor and character? And why shouldn't an older person enjoy the attractive vampire, such as Eric Northman, trotting across the screen? I think all these issues and questions need answering since they, in part, concern the sort of society we live inside of.