Last(-but-one) time I'll whine about that paper, I promise.
Aaargh.
So I turned in the paper. And ten hours later I suddenly remember what escaped me when I did my last editory re-read…
The first sentence.
When I started writing this paper, I couldn’t think of a first sentence to save my life. Nothing. Or rather, nothing good. So I wrote a really stupid first sentence, the kind every essay-writing guidebook tells you to shun at all costs, the kind that goes “it hardly needs to be mentioned that…” and makes any reader go “well then why mention it?”. THAT kind of stupid first sentence. As a placeholder, as it were, so I could go on with the rest of the paper. After all, I could always replace it later on when I felt more inspired, right?
Um, yeah. Right. Unless, of course, I never felt more inspired and on the final re-read had grown so used to ignoring that crappy first sentence that I ignored it one last time and turned the whole thing in. (I did catch all the instances where I wrote “occurance” or “resistence”, though).
It’s probably not the end of the world. I mean, if one crappy sentence in 20 pages is all, it’s really negligible. But it’s the first sentence. The one that everybody reads. The one that paves the way. I can already see the professor starting to read the paper, read the first sentence, and headdesk, because it’s so blatantly idiotic. And of course it may make all the difference between “Well, some of the diagrams are kind of pointless and there’s no real conclusion, but it’s still well-written” and between “The first sentence was already crap, and now the diagrams and the conclusion are crap as well”.
Grrrr. Aaargh.
Well, no good in whining about it now. Stupidity must be punished.
But aaargh.
- - -
In other words, off to LARP for the weekend. Here's €5 saying there will be snow again at some point, or ice at the least. Yes, even though everything looks sunny and warm now.