On Grading; or, I Don't Want It All & I Certainly Don't Want It All Now

Oh the endless unrevised sentences of highly motivated and easily panicked students who during finals week—which seems like it should be possessive but which I believe to be adjectival, in that the word "finals" in its plural form modifies the word "week" in its nominal—neglect such simple things as common sense and reasonable sentence length in a desperate (but ultimately futile) attempt to stuff every last thought they have about this, that or the other topic into a single sentence for fear that, if they do not, the person responsible for grading their final essay—be he a lowly T.A. like myself or a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist like Barry Siegel—will decide that since the entirety of their thinking about this, that or the other was not contained within a single sentence that the aforementioned highly motivated and obviously outrageously caffeinated students will fail this class, lose their scholarship, be forced to attend community college while working 70 hour weeks at In-N-Out Burger and thus never amount to anything in life because they decided that thoughts must be contained in sentences much like they are contained in minds—that is, completely and wholly—with nothing pertaining to the thought they have corralled into the sentence being allowed to exist outside it lest their instructors (myself and Barry) mistake their decision to end a sentence with a desire to end all thought per se and embrace the life they have worked so hard for so long to escape, which they desperately do not want to do but which their instructors (Barry and I) never really think about when we read their essays since we are more concerned with other, more important, matters like whether a student knows how to end a sentence.

Comments

[MT]

Did nobody ever teach you to use a comma?! The sentence is completely unmanageable unless you make "Oh, the endless...." I stumbled first attempt before I realized what was missing.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I added a comma, but I must say, the absence of commas is sorta the point.

[Ancrene Wiseass]

Oh, yes. So true.

Nice nod to Queen in the title of that post, by the way.

[Jason]

Finals week? I do that in every paper. #1 comment in my thesis: "END THE SENTENCE PLEASE GOD END THE SENTENCE"

[eM]

"The poor implementation of big words will still get me the 'A', right? Surely, I deserve a better life than that of those who serve sliders."

[MT]

Really though, isn't length unduly maligned? It's not how far you run with it, it's whether you leave any confused readers behind. I say size doesn't matter. Editors and graders who say so are just length-ists.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"I say size doesn't matter."

Not according to the herbal pill increase your sentence length spammers.

[d]

In high school Advanced Grammar and Composition -- still the most useful course I ever took in 26 consecutive years as a student -- we used something called the "Fog Index" to determine the "grade level" at which we were writing. I'm too lazy to google it to see if it still is in use. Nonetheless, it became something of a sport -- among the boys in the class, at least -- to see how MASSIVE and GIRTHY our fog index could be if we really, really tried to "go huge."

I'd try to analyze that competitive drama, but I don't know if anyone has ever developed an, um, instrument that would allow us to -- you know -- probe the inner psyche of the virginal young male mind. When that happens, I think many aspects of human experience will instantly ripen for study.

[Sharon]

Well, of course it's not the length, it's what you do with it that counts.

Allegedly.

[MT]

If I know American political culture, that's explains what goes in and out of Foggy Bottom.

[MT]

Sorry, I lost count of what entendre we were on.