Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
A crucible indeed
We can be reasonably confident that this high schooler didn’t download her essay from the Internet.
I have reprinted it verbatim.
“the crucible”
umm the character ima use in this Essay is John Proctor because ahh he was like the main dude in the story yeah. John proctor has three children & ahh I think proctor has made the right choice.
That’s it. That’s the whole essay. I wonder what grade my sister gave?
Oh, well. I’ve often thought “The Crucible” sucked; undoubtedly, that’s why this student has authored such an anemic essay. “Macbeth” might have inspired her to loftier heights.
Don’t forget the Valley contest (see below)!
D.
The student, a male, received an F. It was an in-class essay (the only kind I give so that the sneaky little bastards CAN’T download off the internet). This particular student doesn’t have the brains to blow himself you know where, so the essay is bad not because he didn’t like “The Crucible” but because he writes THAT BADLY.
Will an F wake that student up?
That’s the difference an F can make. If the parents care or not.
My sister had a classmate in college who said “I got a D minus–Thank GOD!”
A teenager regularly shows up on a website I frequent, and that’s pretty much how all her posts read.
I can get about two lines in before I give up.
i cant stand people who write like that (ima, ahhh), even online it’s stupid. gotta feel sorry for the kid though…he’s obviously gonna end up asking if you want fries with that…
I don’t know if I could have written an essay like that if I’d tried.
It’s almost physically painful for me to try to slog through poor writing skills, which is at least a small part of the reason I spend so much time hanging out at writers’ blogs… they tend to get that stuff right,eh? [although I am fully aware that I screw up, too, so I try not to be a weiner about it. Um, sometimes I fail miserably at not being a weiner, too, though.]
My favorite parts: the umm and ahh. I wonder: are there shades of meaning that distinguish the two?
Before we tell people to “write like they talk” we need to know if they are able to speak acceptable English (or in whatever language they speak). I’ll bet this essayist wrote just like he/she speaks. In this case, that would have been poor advice.