Marking undergrad essays, so much fun (not)...

[foxe]

... only 50 papers to go

Comments

[thornae]

Barry Hughart's fisrt three novels are superb. Since he only ever wrote three novels, you'd do well to track down all of them.

Bridge of Birds is the first, the easiest to find, and (IMHO) the best of the three.

His novels are sublime. They are about an ancient China that never was.
Neil Gaiman personally recommends them. They may cause laughter and tears.
You have been warned.

[pwaring]

"Can't people even use their own language properly these days?"

No, because it's not taught properly at school. This is painfully evident when you get undergraduates to learn Latin and you realise that they don't understand what the perfect tense is (amongst *many* other things).

[pyrrha17]

And vice versa - I think I have a much better grasp of the English language because I studied Latin at school.

[pyrrha17]

I preferred purple or green - less violent coloured, so I felt more free to mark my maths students' appalling grammar and spelling... *shudders at the memory*

[asmodel]

Isn't presentation part of the mark? I know these aren't English essays, but surely if you were to submit an academic paper for publication, you would need to have some basic grasp of the language.
The editors aren't going to re-write the entire thing for you.

[splatchtrock]

You would have thought, given that I assume most of these students are English, they'd be able to use English.

[pyrrha17]

There's a big difference between learning something by ear, and learning something carefully and properly by the rules. Take any pub song as an example.