Wednesday, March 09, 2005

An Email Interaction With A Student

O.k. so out of generosity, I offer to review student papers prior to the deadline. Until this semester, only one or two students would take me up on the offer. This semester, however, I've got an arse-load of students who are taking advantage of it, and one, particularly bad writer is attempting to get me to look at more than one draft.

Here is a recent email interaction with him in chronological order:

Email 1: I followed your instructions, and I think that this paper is HUGE LEAPS, ahead of my last paper. I hope that you have time to look over this!! Thanks again!!

Portion of my response: *note that there is a difference between "there" and "their" you absolutely have to have this figured out before you move on into the world.

Email 2: We cleaned up the littlest grammatical errors, and we still cant find out where you see that I don't get the THEIR and THERE....I know what they mean, and we looked all night to find the ones that you were talking about, and maybe we just couldn't see them, but we even did the search text to find all of the THEIR and THEREs. So if you know where these are please point them out!! I hope that with all the cutting and pasting that you think that is at least going in a better direction the one I sent you the other day. I REALLY hope that you have the time to look at this copy for me. I really need to know if this is getting better, and I thank you because with work and class I have no other way to get a professionals opinion.....

My second response: Here is at least one sentence, that took me all of 30 seconds to find that uses the word wrong:

"I wanted to eliminate the females that worked much less then there counterparts, and made under $10,000, just to see what this total might look at."


Email 3: Otherwise was the paper getting better though??


AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

remember the episode of 'sex in the city' where BIG's new wife writes carrie a note saying something to the effect of "...sorry I couldn't be their"?