Money Makes the Monkey Dance

A few weeks ago, I had my first assignment due in my literary analysis & writing class. Since English and grammar are sort of my thing, I was really excited about the paper. I was lucky enough to have Sally Awalt as my English/Language Arts teacher in high school, not once but twice. She taught freshman English the year I entered high school, then moved to senior English the year I was a senior. She really pushed us on composition and literary analysis and it's something I enjoyed and did really well at. In the college classes I've taken before, I've honed my writing skills and gotten excellent feedback from professors. If there's one thing I know how to do, it's write an essay!

So our first assignment in ENGL 3308 was to analyze protest poetry written by feminists in the 1960's. I enjoyed the assignment, even though I don't really identify with the ideas in many of the poems we read. I threw myself into writing the paper and had it ready well before the due date. I even had it proofread by a friend who is a writer by trade. She had a few suggestions, but said the paper was great. I was excited to turn the paper in, and really amped the day we got the papers back. I couldn't wait to see all the accolades and compliments he was sure to have written! I couldn't wait to see the affirmation of my mad writing skillz and see all the ways in which I'd impressed my professor.

The day he returned our papers, the professor said there were 9 A's in the class. He said, "They don't call me Dr. A for nothing!" In a class of 23, with 9 A's, I was feeling very confident. For the next hour, he stood at the front talking about good things people had done, things that needed improvement, etc. He read excerpts from some peoples' papers as examples. At the end of the class he returned our papers and I anxiously flipped through, noticed a few corrections he made and finally got to the final page where he had written:

"Develop your allusion more thoroughly. Very readable writing style." B+

WHAT!?!?!

I was really disappointed, to say the least. After getting over my initial reaction, I could see the things that kept me from making an A. It didn't matter that my paper was really well written because I didn't follow the formula he gave us. I thought I had to just make an allusion, not develop it. I thought the formula he had prescribed was a suggestion, but realized he meant for us to follow it exactly. I thought I could make statements based on general historical knowledge without prefacing it with "I think" or "It is my understanding" or "I believe." He dinged me for not citing sources for statements like "In the late 18th century blacks in America were regarded as being unintelligent and better suited to physical labor." So instead, I should have written "As I understand American history...." Whatev.

It's a very boring way of writing, not at all what I'd expect to do in an upper level university course, but as Pressly says, "money makes the monkey dance" so the paper I turned in yesterday was tedious to write, I found it boring in nature and there were several phrases that suffered from chronic overuse, but I'll be damned if he's going to penalize me for writing well this time! I even had him edit my rough draft on our prescribed "writing day" where we are excused from class to write or can come to class to get his input.