Judge my paper by this excerpt, let’s see if I can make my lib-bot teacher’s head explode and still get an A on this assignment.
Not if you don’t proofread a little more closely.
I’d get a headache if I had to read a whole paper in that style, by the way. Just sounds a little forced, is all.
[quote]anonym wrote:
Not if you don’t proofread a little more closely.
I’d get a headache if I had to read a whole paper in that style, by the way. Just sounds a little forced, is all.[/quote]
Agreed. It sounds like you’ve used language that you haven’t yet mastered
[quote]SpartanX wrote:
Judge my paper by this excerpt, let’s see if I can make my lib-bot teacher’s head explode and still get an A on this assignment.
The political slant of the book, ‘Government By The People,’ would be centre-right with regard for the solidarity and potence of the American system. This is balanced however with important concessions and randomly placed blurbs in order to emphasize social narrative concessions. This additional material is geared towards expressing the struggle and assuaging the cultural self-esteems of various minority groups, these being African-Americans, women, homosexuals and Latino-Americans. While these opinions are expressed, the overall view of the system is a positivist and progessive one, that indeed with these new ‘PC’ concessions made; we have moved forward from a sordid history, and continue forward to a brave new multicultural, straight/lgbt, rainbow-colored world, of ideal situations, where black students tutor asian ones in math, and Anglo-Saxons pick lettuce for Chicano masters.[/quote]
Let me guess, the title of this paper is called:
Why Political Correctness Fucking Sucks, by SpartanX
Good message but you might consider a rewrite. I’d give you an ‘A’ if you wrote a proper sentence. HINT: you have too many run-on sentences, at least 3 spelling errors, and awkward prepositional use.
For example, this clause makes no sense: “While these opinions are expressed, the overall view of the system is a positivist and progessive one, that indeed with these new ‘PC’ concessions made…”
I admire your effort to try and make your writing entertaining but stick with the basics until you master writing a complete and proper sentence.
Spartan, have you ever read The Elements of Style?
It’s an excellent primer on writing - and is required reading in many high schools.
Simpler and to the point is ALWAYS better. Remember that clear thinking and clear writing go hand in hand. If your writing is muddy your thinking will be; and vice versa. You can jazz it up later, when you get more experience. Also, it’s a good idea to read on a regular basis - good writers are prolific readers, but only of the very finest writing.
It needs to be broke up and a few things left out, I just thought the last line was pretty funny and worthy of a handjob.
[quote]SpartanX wrote:
I just thought the last line was pretty funny…[/quote]
Yes, and it has the potential to be really effective, too.
You fail chick studies, dude.
If you need some meat, check out Thomas Sowell’s ‘Economic Fact and Fallacy’(or Fiction, I can’t recall). It addresses the myth that minorities and women are underpaid, and asserts that capitalism simply will not support racism or sexism. I only have the audio CDs but would assume he cites the studies he refers to in the book.
Show, don’t tell.
If I were grading that paragraph, I would write “Proof?” in red. One reason students get poor grades when they disagree with the professor is that they don’t engage the material itself; they merely state their reactions.
Give it a few years, maybe after you’ve taken a senior level high school English class.
Or perhaps a rhetoric and writing class in college, something at the 101 level.
[quote]katzenjammer wrote:
Spartan, have you ever read The Elements of Style?
It’s an excellent primer on writing - and is required reading in many high schools.
Simpler and to the point is ALWAYS better. Remember that clear thinking and clear writing go hand in hand. If your writing is muddy your thinking will be; and vice versa. You can jazz it up later, when you get more experience. Also, it’s a good idea to read on a regular basis - good writers are prolific readers, but only of the very finest writing.
[/quote]
K: I like this even more:
I used to buy that book for my graduate students. It was painful to read what they would “write.”
Of course you’ll get an A, it’s poly sci.
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
katzenjammer wrote:
Spartan, have you ever read The Elements of Style?
It’s an excellent primer on writing - and is required reading in many high schools.
Simpler and to the point is ALWAYS better. Remember that clear thinking and clear writing go hand in hand. If your writing is muddy your thinking will be; and vice versa. You can jazz it up later, when you get more experience. Also, it’s a good idea to read on a regular basis - good writers are prolific readers, but only of the very finest writing.
K: I like this even more:
I used to buy that book for my graduate students. It was painful to read what they would “write.”
[/quote]
Thanks Doc, looks like an excellent book. It’s on my next amazon order.
I need proofread and further develop my English writing skills.
The content, and language is there. I suppose I need to learn better style and observe a clearer more concise form of expression.
[quote]SpartanX wrote:
I need proofread and further develop my English writing skills.
The content, and language is there. I suppose I need to learn better style and observe a clearer more concise form of expression.[/quote]
Practice! That is part of the reason I started posting in the forums.
What better way to get feedback than from people who don’t know you?
[quote]SpartanX wrote:
I need proofread and further develop my English writing skills.
The content, and language is there. I suppose I need to learn better style and observe a clearer more concise form of expression.[/quote]
I’m not sure the content is there. It is hard to judge based upon a single paragraph.
If that was your thesis statement, I would say you were off to a decent start, aside from the technical points brough up by the other posters.
You can’t make unsubstantiated statements and expect to be taken seriously in an academic exercise though. Construct your following paragraphs by pulling a few quotations and use them to back up each statement, properly framed to maintain context, and deliver the reader to your point.
That might get you a better grade if you are in a lower level english class at a community college. At least thats the approach I took with my ultra-lib wikkan lesbo english professor at CCAC.
If you are not going to be polliticaly correct, you better be technicaly correct. That will give you the ability to take your case to the Dean later and get the grade you actualy earned.
To follow up on this, there is interpretation and there is explanation. Following Leo Strauss, I use interpretation to mean attempting to understand what a speaker has said and what he understood by what he said. Explanation, however, is the attempt to determine the implications of the speech, some of which the speaker may not have been aware.
Many students try to show their cleverness by giving an explanation of a text, yet they omit the interpretation. I suppose that’s perfectly post-modern - if you’re into that sort of thing - but it doesn’t make for good scholarship.
One way of approaching interpretation is to give the text the most charitable reading you can. At the same time, interpretation often requires guessing based upon our beliefs about the writer; we believe some of Socrates’ arguments to be ironic, for example, based upon our understanding of the whole corpus, not because each instance of irony is, itself, obvious. Similarly, we might discount some of Plato’s theories as being ad hominem (in the classic sense), because we think that Plato was too intelligent to believe those theories in the form he presented them.
But one must be careful not to allow suppositions to entirely color the interpretation. If we have evidence that the writer lied, this is germane to intpretation. We must ask ourselves whether he lied, why he lied, and what he understood by the lying. This is rarely fruitful when reading popular contemporary authors, mostly because it is difficult to believe popular writers intelligent enough to remain consistent and maintain a plan throughout a single work, much less several. Our interpretation is limited by the level of skill of the author, since we must rely on his plan - if, indeed, he has one - to inform our interpretation.
But this limitation does not give us license to jump straight to explanation. Rather, we ought to interpret the work as best we can, and make a case for the author’s arguments. From there, we can engage in critique.
This sounds like a lot of work. It is, which is why there are so few books worth really reading well.
[quote]SkyzykS wrote:
If that was your thesis statement, I would say you were off to a decent start, aside from the technical points brough up by the other posters.
You can’t make unsubstantiated statements and expect to be taken seriously in an academic exercise though. Construct your following paragraphs by pulling a few quotations and use them to back up each statement, properly framed to maintain context, and deliver the reader to your point.
That might get you a better grade if you are in a lower level english class at a community college. At least thats the approach I took with my ultra-lib wikkan lesbo english professor at CCAC.
If you are not going to be polliticaly correct, you better be technicaly correct. That will give you the ability to take your case to the Dean later and get the grade you actualy earned.
[/quote]
[quote]nephorm wrote:
This sounds like a lot of work. It is, which is why there are so few books worth really reading well.
[/quote]
So, should you read, then interprete, then review the interpretation, then re-interprete the interpretation to make sure that your interpretation of what you have read is what you have interpreted, or should you read and interprete the peice several times to compare and contrast each interpretation of each reading?
Then, soemone else reads what you have written and tries to interprete your interpretation based on what they have read, which might not be what you have written, because their interpretation of what you have written is based on what they think you wrote, which is realy just the best way we can communicate our thoughts, and not necessarily what we actualy think.
It all becomes very subjective and leads me to wonder whether language inhibits the abilty to express thought, or if limited thought inhibits its own ability to be expressed using language?
Then sometimes I wonder if I even think that, or if that is just as close as I can get to thinking it using language that I understand.
[quote]SkyzykS wrote:
So, should you read, then interprete, then review the interpretation, then re-interprete the interpretation to make sure that your interpretation of what you have read is what you have interpreted…?
[/quote]
You should do whatever you think makes your paper worthy of being read, holding true to the purpose of the assignment.
Take one interpretation and defend it to the teeth or use many contrasting interpretations to give a full “objective” analysis. I don’t think it really matters as long as it is clear and concise. Whatever one decides the choice should not be ambiguous.