I'm Not Dead Yet (or: Marking Comments Made Simple)

Hello, everyone. Merry Christmas. I'm sorry I've been ignoring this blog since, well, October, but I've been busy marking. And marking. And marking some more. I do not think I shall ever escape from this hellish wasteland of essays without thesis statements, arguments, analysis, complexity of thought, or even simply page numbers; in fact, I still have forty to mark before January 4. When those are done, maybe I'll finally be able to say something about narrative and even update the Filthy Plagiarists' Roll of Dishonour, which I have been neglecting shamefully.*

For now, as a special Holiday Present, I give you:

How to Interpret Your Markers' Cryptic Comments

Markers write in code. They have to; if they wrote what they were actually thinking about your papers, they would probably be fired. However, if you are truly anxious to improve your essay-writing skills, you can learn to crack this code and apply the resulting real messages to your work. Here are a few typical marking comments,** followed by translations from Markerese into English:

Actual Note: You make many interesting points in this essay. However...

Translation: I have nothing good to say about your paper but have been forced by the leaders of the feel-good TAing workshops I have been blackmailed into taking to start with a positive comment, damn it.

Explanation: It is always wise to begin your comments on a high note. The best papers merit comments that are almost all on a high note; the worst can drive markers to start out with, "You have very nice handwriting," or, "The first word of your paper is quite strong." The "interesting points" comment constitutes an act of desperation and often appears on papers that do, in fact, contain no interesting points at all. If a marker tells you your essay is interesting, it probably really isn't.

One caveat: if a marker labels a paper "very interesting" or actually goes on to mention specific points that have impressed her, you're probably all right. It's only when the word "interesting" appears on its own without explanation or elaboration that you're in trouble.

Actual Note: You tend not to delve deeply enough into the significance of the observations you make.

Translation: There is no analysis in this essay! There is no freaking analysis in this essay at all! What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you expecting me to do all your work for you? Grab a clue and actually interpret the text, you lazy, lazy person!

Explanation: The "no analysis" problem has really been getting appallingly bad lately; every literature marker I know brings it up incessantly. When you have to mark a batch of fifty essays and forty-five of them turn out to contain no analysis, you sort of lose it a bit. However, you can't scream at the students; screaming is not productive, and again, it will probably get you fired. The "significance" comment is a polite but perfectly accurate way of describing the problem.

Actual Note: Your writing is often difficult to understand; you tend to lose control of your sentences.

Translation: English has this beautiful thing called "grammar." Please learn it. Once you know what a bloody freaking verb*** is, you may be able to structure your sentences in such a way that they are actually comprehensible to most speakers of the language.

Explanation: As much as I hate to become a grumpy old lady and start in with the "When I was an undergrad, the roads were paved with gold, and we all wrote magical essays that turned into dryads and sang in mystical voices every time we handed them in" kind of garbage, I do have to say that when I was an undergrad, we were actually penalised when we made grammatical and structural errors. If I took marks off my students every time serious errors cropped up, most of my students would fail very, very badly. Many of them don't even proofread. They write these essays at home--on computers--and they don't even proofread. What am I supposed to do with a paper in which Robinson Crusoe's name is spelled in three different ways? Why should I tolerate your apparent inability to tell the difference between Aslan the Lion and Lord Asriel? If that sentence doesn't make sense to me, someone who has been reading this sort of stuff for the last ten years, how can it possibly make sense to you?

Actual Note: Your word choice is sometimes problematic.

Translation: Put your hands in the air and step away from the thesaurus. If you insist on continuing to cling to it, I have this wonderful book you can use in conjunction with it. It's called a dictionary. Do not choose words if you do not bloody well know what they mean!

Explanation: Yes, it's nice to read an essay in which a student doesn't use the word "significant" six times in the same paragraph. No, it's not nice to read an essay in which a student has substituted cogent, compelling, convincing, denoting, eloquent, expressing, expressive, facund, forceful, heavy, important, indicative, knowing, meaning, momentous, powerful, pregnant, representative, rich, sententious, serious, sound, suggestive, symbolic, telling, valid, and weighty**** for "significant" without thinking about whether or not the supposed synonyms really fit. The thesaurus is a wonderful tool, but only in conjunction with a dictionary.

Actual Note: This essay has a lot of potential, but at the moment, it still needs work.

Translation: This essay is terrible. It is really, really terrible. It has "potential" in the same way that a rock has the "potential" to move extremely quickly; however, if you just leave the essay and the rock lying there, they will both remain inert. Please, please, please put more work into your next paper. Think about what you are writing. I know you can. If you don't, you're just going to keep on handing in these stupid damned rocks.

Explanation: No matter how much we moan and groan (and rant and scream) about your essays, we don't think you are stupid. What infuriates us is that we know you're not stupid...and yet you still insist on handing in terrible essays. You seem to us to be expecting knowledge to seep out of the woodwork and fill you up without you putting in any effort at all. At the same time, we know you will have to work hard to learn how to analyse properly. You sit there and wait for the knowledge to come; we sit there and wait for you to discover that you have to go to the knowledge. The gap between these two sets of assumptions is the Land of the Essay from Hell.

Your paper does have potential. It has the potential not to be bad. We can see the seeds of thought glimmering among the chaff of plot summary. We can sense that if you stopped simply writing down that Alice did go down the rabbit hole and considered for two or three minutes why she went down it, you might discover the wonderful world of Interpretation for yourself.

Merry Christmas, undergrads. I am about to do a number on the essays of some of your comrades. Do not join their swelling ranks.

And have a happy New Year, too.

*There are just too damn many Filthy Plagiarists. They're everywhere. I get dozens a day. I've had to stop writing them down; if I hadn't, I wouldn't have got anything else done this fall. I'll see about revising the way the Roll works and start it up again in January.

**Some of the comments apply mainly to analytical essays on literature, but many of them fit other sorts of papers as well.

***Ah, verbs. Everybody knows what a verb is, right?......Right?......Wrong. Most undergrads will happily describe a verb as "an action word," but many have no idea how to identify one. When I give my students the following sentence:

There is a book on the table.

the majority will identify "on" as the verb. Why? Well...it comes after the subject ("Verbs always come after the subject, right?"), it tells us (they claim) what the book is doing ("It's on the table. What other word could be the verb?"), and, for some reason that really, really escapes me, nobody thinks of "to be" as a verb any more. The whole shape-shifting nature of verbs also eludes students. They don't think of "is," "was," and "to be" as different versions of the same word, and they fail to notice that "on," unlike actual verbs, does not ever change its form.

Yes, I sometimes think that I may soon go mad.

****I admit it: I cut-and-pasted these words from a thesaurus website. The students probably did too.

The Filthy Plagiarists' Roll of Dishonour: September 2007

[This post is today's second. See below for the real October 15 post.]

The 25 September 2007 inductees into FPROD are:

• an observations essay about parakeets birds
• examples of introdction [sic] of an essay on how to begin writing a essay describing a room to someone who has never s
• expository essay on the importance of having integrity
• 4 page concept essay on aliens
• thesis statement of batman essay
• process analysis essay on sandwich
• descriptive essay about my aunt
• hobbit thesis
• elizabethan photo paragraph of writing describing it
• essay show how bilbo is a hero
• essays on the impact of writing and speech
• subjective and objective words describing a girl
• descriptive writing, describe a woman
• useful narrative essay writing phrases
• bilbo such a hero transition to next paragraph in the hobbit
• essay thesis on batman
• 5 paragraph essay aliens
• all that is gold does not glitter analysis
• descriptive writing ants
• descriptive essay about dinner
• essay in support of colloquialism
• write a three to four-page essay that explains what writing and/or reading can mean in a person's life
• essay on fear
• thesis statement and example in body paragraph about bilbo hobbit
• explain frodo and his friends relationship

Friends Don't Let Friends Use Ad Hominem Arguments

As I predicted on September 30,* my defence sort of took over my life for a bit there, and I was unable to post, substantially or unsubstantially. However, the defence is now over, and Corrections loom on the horizon. I still haven't managed to find time for the narrative mode (soooon), but I think I can manage another logical fallacy today.

A few issues before I begin:

1) I am, at long last, a Doctor of Philosophy. You are therefore obliged to call me Dr. Kem and grovel whenever I enter a room. You should also note that whereas before I was just some nut with a Blogger account and a vendetta, I am now some nut with a Blogger account, a vendetta, and a doctorate. Tremble before me, O Ye Nations.

2) Today is apparently Blog Action Day, when the millions of bloggers out there are meant to unite and write about the same issue (in this case, the environment). Now, I am the proud owner of a nastily suspicious mind. I see two possibilities here:

a) The originators of Blog Action Day are sweet, innocent people who do not understand acronyms.

b) The originators of Blog Action Day are criminal masterminds bent on exposing as many blogs as possible as being, well, BAD.

Both possibilities please me quite a lot. I have thus cheerfully signed up for the resulting praise and/or humiliation, and I shall be using an environmental example below. I feel strongly that both sweet, innocent people and criminal masterminds should be encouraged in all their endeavours, sometimes simultaneously.

3) Over the course of the last two weeks, so many Filthy Plagiarists have come sliming out of the woodwork that I'm not going to be able to comment individually on every entry. I caught fifty-seven plagiarists in the past fortnight. When you consider that these idiots possibly constitute about 0.000002% of the plagiarists out there--"these idiots" being the ones who 1) use Internet search engines to 2) enter words that 3) turn up on my blog, then 4) click on the resulting link(s)--you just have to throw yourself violently down and cry. I'm going to empty September's FPROD and stick it in a post (accessible through a link in the margin), then fill up the Roll with October's entries. They will make you scream and weep.

See below for slightly less individual comments on the new inductees.

Today's featured logical fallacy is one of my favourites. Well...technically, they're all my favourites. I'm probably going to be trotting out the "one of my favourites" line every time I introduce a new logical fallacy. What's fantastic about these suckers is that they're so very easy to use and sometimes seem to be good ideas. If you ever want to witness logical fallacies used skilfully, watch a political debate. Politicians think in logical fallacies. They do it so well that no one realises until hours afterwards that the entire debate has consisted of four people passionately, forcefully, and devastatingly not saying anything at all.

You do not want your essays to resemble politicians' speeches. Trust me. A student approached me the other day and asked if it wouldn't be better for his argument to be forceful than accurate. I advised him to leave forceful inaccuracy to the Prime Minister's Office. Yes, persuasive essays need to be convincing in tone, but they also need to be convincing in facts.

Consequently, you should really avoid the ad hominem fallacy. "Ad hominem" is a Latin term that translates as "against the man"; an ad hominem argument is therefore one that attempts to refute a threatening counter-argument by launching a personal attack on whoever has proposed it. An example might be:

The hysteria over global warming is completely unwarranted. Liberals rant and scream about this issue but cannot present any hard evidence to suggest that human-induced global warming even exists; their bleeding-heart, flip-flopping tendency to leap madly and indiscriminately upon various environmental bandwagons has caused this whole non-issue to be blown completely out of proportion.

On the surface, this passage is effective; the writer directs withering scorn at his opponents in an attempt to discredit them. However, look at how little he is actually saying. Some of his tactics are subtle and some obvious, but all of them work together to ensure that he "refutes" his opponents without having to present any evidence at all. He begins with the word "hysteria," a biased characterisation of the issue at hand that paints his opponents as unreasonable and out of control, then connects it to a hyperbolic inaccuracy that is nonetheless technically true (if his opponents were really "hysterical," they would probably need to calm down a bit). The word "liberal" has, over the last few years, become an insult in the mouths of (American) conservatives,** though if you look "liberal" up in the dictionary, you'll see that it's not really an insult at all. It can be used, nowadays, to characterise large groups of people as not worth listening to. "Liberal" has, in fact, become an ad hominem argument all on its own.

The "[Members of group X] rant and scream" accusation is a very common one and is much in evidence on Letters-to-the-Editor pages everywhere. By implying that his opponents are unable to converse quietly and reasonably about this issue, the writer further discredits them. He goes on to mention that these ranting and screaming liberals cannot produce any hard evidence to support their position, but he doesn't explain what he means by "hard evidence" and moves quickly into a seemingly slight modification of his own argument (he has turned "global warming" into "human-induced global warming") that nonetheless has huge implications (few people seriously deny that "global warming" is taking place, but some contest the idea that humans are causing global warming). He is hiding this rift in meaning behind his contempt for his opponents.

"Bleeding-heart" and "flip-flopping" are two adjectival phrases often appended to the word "liberal" by ad-hominem-oriented arguers. In this context, they make no sense and add no evidence to the argument (such as it is); they are present simply because the writer identifies them strongly with the word "liberal." Note that a tendency to leap indiscriminately upon various environmental bandwagons is certainly not "flip-flopping"; it may even be the opposite of "flip-flopping." "Madly and indiscriminately" implies, again, that the writer's opponents are unreasonable; it also suggests that they are somewhat mindless and react to issues in a knee-jerk manner. Accusing an opponent of "leaping upon a bandwagon" is another way of characterising him or her as unthinking and liable to follow trends simply for the sake of following trends. The fact that someone would leap "madly" upon the bandwagon of a "non-issue" makes the entire situation even more egregious.

The passage is full of information. Very little of it pertains to global warming. Instead, the writer attacks his opponents. He sets them up as straw men a little (through the word "hysteria"); his main strategy, however, is to discredit them by making them look like fools.

If you are not a politician in full-on Election Mode, you're going to want to avoid ad hominem arguments. They are effective for perhaps three or four seconds; then your readers will wake up and realise that you are presenting insults, not arguments. If "The spotted owl is not endangered because you are a boo-boo-head" doesn't work as an argument, the more subtly worded piece of useless libel above won't either. Your job is to refute the counter-argument, not glare at the person making it and say, "Your momma!"

The Filthy Plagiarists' Roll of Dishonour: Mammoth Edition

Today's FPROD*** list is so soul-destroyingly long that I'm going to have to divide the inductees into categories. Please note that all spelling errors and typos are the fault of the Filthy Plagiarists themselves.

J. R. R. Tolkien is Spinning in His Grave

thesis statement for The Hobbit

the hobbit thesis statement

WHAT'S A GOOD THESIS STATEMENT FOR THE HOBBIT

I DON'T KNOW MAYBE YOU SHOULD READ THE BLOODY BOOK YOU STUPID PIECE OF GUTTER SLIME! You may also want to lay off the caps lock. Gosh, I hope that these three morons are all in the same class and steal the same thesis statement...

1 to 2 paragraph summaries of each chapter in the Hobbit

the hobbit one paragraph summary

two paragraph sumary paragraph from the hobbit

I have a great idea. Why don't you guys sit down and spend ten minutes summarising The Hobbit? Perhaps you will even use your mushy, neglected brains in the process.

debatable question for the hobbit

sample student essay the hobbit revising

Doesn't anyone have any original ideas about this novel? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Hook sentence for Fellowship of the ring essay

"Hi! I'm writing an essay on an engaging work of fantasy! However, I am extremely lazy and cannot think of a way to start! Perhaps I shall attempt to steal one! What an excellent idea! Too bad I have no idea how to use Google!"

everything thing is glitter not gold--essay topic

all that is gold does not glitter critical analysis

Granted, only the second of these entries may actually be related to The Lord of the Rings; the first may be an extremely mangled version of the saying "All that glitters is not gold." Yet it's kind of hard to tell. This plagiarist is lazy and incompetent. What a great combination.

You Want Me to...Read...the...Book?

Lead a discussion on Hamlet's interior indecision

You have to lead a discussion on Hamlet's interior indecision, and you're checking the Internet for clues? How do you expect to lead the freaking discussion if you don't actually think about the text?

One Thousand and One nights Thematic essay

...'Cause your search terms are terribly specific and will probably help you find exactly the right essay to steal.

essay on lather and nothing else

Piercing the Darkness Essay THesis Statement

"Lather and Nothing Else" is a short story; Piercing the Darkness is a novel. The teachers who assigned both of them should have provided their classes with specific topics. Enjoy the stolen goods, silly teachers.

don't panic thesis

I'm assuming this essay may be on Douglas Adams' Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a book about which, please note, it is actually bloody fun to write.

I Live in the City; I've Never Seen a Tree!

vivid description nature

examples of descriptive writing sunset

description of a tree for an essay

description sky trees air moment

I have a strangely revolutionary idea. Why don't you four stupid idiots leave your bedrooms, stroll out into the wide world, sit on benches somewhere, and describe nature? Nature is not exactly hard to find. I live in Toronto, and I can still see a tree any time I want. You people are unbearably lazy. For crying out loud.

I Live in the Country; I've Never Seen a Room!

describing a room you like essay

describing a room essay

example essay writing about a descriptive a room

free descriptive essays on on my room

It's. A. Room. There. Are. Rooms. All. Over. The. Place. Go. Into. One. And. Describe. It. You. Freak. Of. Nature.

I Live in a Box; I've Never Seen a Person!

examples of writing describing a woman

So...many...students unable to describe a woman...

description of an ugly person

description of an ugly man an essay

These last two entries came courtesy of the same Filthy Plagiarist, ten minutes apart. I expect she took pause after reading the description of Marian from The Woman in White and realised that she had to be more specific. Gosh, I do hope someone tries to steal that WW description, though.

essay of description of an ugly man

Woman! Woman! Describe Marian and get caught!

describe an angry person thick description

..."thick"...?

write an essay describing your favorite teacher

Four days before he submitted the above entry, this Filthy Plagiarist searched for "thesis implied or stated in descriptive and narrative essay." In other words, he started off with a legitimate search, the results of which could have helped him decide how to construct his essay, then returned half a week later to steal stuff.

essay describe feature of the face

Look in the mirror, pizza-brain.

But That Would Take Way Too Much Work

free essay on how to describe a picture

write a describing essay on a picture

There's just no way these assignments are ever going to be easy enough for you guys, is there?

But Isn't It More Fun When You Get to Eat the Object of Your Description?

descriptive dinner essay

descriptive essay on dinner

writing essay on dinners

There's really just no way these assignments are ever going to be easy enough for you guys, is there?

Nope...There Isn't

a descriptive essay about my camera

It's your camera.

writing an essay describing my skills

They're your skills.

descriptive writing about somebody's experience

You mean "my experience," right? Except you're stealing somebody else's experience and pretending it's yours? Right? Right?

descriptive essays on prejudice

sample object descriptive essays

When you're done, you can add some stuff about that thing you saw at the place.

EXAMPLES OF A NARRATIVE, DESCRIPTIVE ESSAYS ON NIGHTMARES

WHAT THE BLEEDING HECK IS WITH ALL THE SHOUTING?

I Am Completely Incompetent and Reside in a Deep Black Hole

description essay about how to make sandwich

writing essay process analysis how to end a relationship

process analysis essay fishing hunting

Perhaps you could draw on your personal experience and produce a genuine document enlivened by your own wry, witty observations?......No?......

Feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelings...

how to finish of essay on fear

Have you considered figuring out how you started it and kind of going from there?

paragraph example about friendship

expository paragraph of what is frienship

If you can't deal with this topic, I completely wash my hands of you. Go away.

an essay thesis statement on road rage

I am having plagiarist rage. Give me a call; we should talk.

Your Laziness Truly Knows No Bounds

useful phrases narrative essay

beautiful phrases used in essays

essay writing-phrases

You may be interested to hear that a phrase markers love is: "my boneheaded readers." They are also quite fond of: "a tree like a giant icicle of gargantuan beauty from the dawn of time," "my lovely horse running through the field,"**** and "hot! hot! hot! girls! girls! girls!"

This One Doesn't Fit Anywhere Else

elizabeth I thesis essay

I hope your razor-sharp Google search, which found you 1,540,000 relevant pages, led to your successful acquisition of a stolen thesis that your teacher recognised and used to get you freaking expelled.

...the Hell?

a conclusion in a essay to three knights

teacher has students write one paragraph boy writes about aliens girl writes about tea

I'm pretty sure these people are trying to plagiarise, but I have no idea why or how.

I Still Have a Nastily Suspicious Mind

essays on having integrity

my aunt descriptive writing

These two entries appeared not long after similar ones turned up in the last FPROD list. I'll allow them because they came from first-time visitors, but I'm a bit sceptical. I think someone may be playing silly buggers with me.

If they're real, they make me very sad.

In my next blog entry, perhaps there will really be something on the narrative mode. I do wish I had more actual time. Ah well.

*Actually, it was October 1, but Blogger does this weird thing where if you start a post on one day and finish it on another, it'll publish the date of the starting day, not the finishing one.

**"Liberal" means something rather different in Canada. In fact, it means a number of things. In fact, the issue is so complicated that I'm just going to sweep it under the metaphorical carpet and stroll away, whistling.

***Yes, I know "FPROD" sounds rather dirty in a vague and undefinable way. Unlike the creators of BAD, I do understand acronyms. I just don't care when they sound rather dirty. I've mentioned this issue before, haven't I? Memory...going...
****So I'm fond of Father Ted. So sue me. Go on. Go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on...

The Straw Man Will Get You Every Time

If I weren't bloody damned freaking out about my dissertation defence on October 11, I would apologise for the erratic posting schedule. However, I am bloody damned freaking out about my dissertation defence on October 11 and can't promise frequent or lengthy posts until the hideous two-hour Examination From Hell has come and gone. I certainly won't be able to deal with the narrative mode until the middle of October at the earliest. Blame academia. I usually do.

In the meantime, I have pulled myself together just enough to bring you the first in a series of posts on logical fallacies. Like the grammar posts, the fallacy posts will turn up now and then when I need something less horrifyingly long to write and/or want to take a break from the modes. An understanding of fallacy will come in handy when you're writing persuasively, so pay attention.

A logical fallacy is a sort of tool that helps a writer cheat on an argument, filling in holes with falsities, evasions, or truly imbecilic bits of "reasoning." Many writers believe they have presented well-reasoned arguments when what they have actually done is litter a paper with fallacious statements that deserve to be clubbed about their ears until they stop moving. The most common of the fallacies have names: red herring, straw man, ad hominem argument, circular reasoning, and so on. Politicians know and love them all. You should know them too, though once you do, you should probably leave them to the politicians.*

Today, I'm going to discuss my, and probably your, favourite: the straw man fallacy. The straw man is beloved of all undergrads everywhere, probably because it is so bleeding convenient. Unadulterated evil often is.

Imagine your prof has set you an essay on global warming.** You happen to believe that what you think of as the "fuss over global warming" is much ado about nothing,**** and you construct an argument that revolves around this belief. In your first paragraph, you include the sentence:

The idea that the planet is liable to be destroyed any day now because of the simple existence of the SUV is absurd.

You are here presenting a counter-argument and preparing to pick it to pieces. There's only one problem:

What sane person would argue that the "simple existence" of the SUV will cause the planet to be "destroyed any day now"?

The straw man fallacy constitutes the presentation of a counter-argument that is absurd, easy to refute, and usually non-existent. Think of it this way: if you were a medieval squire and your master-at-arms decided to train you in sword-play by having you hack at a man constructed out of straw, you would soon become very good at stabbing scarecrows to death. The first time you had to fight a real opponent carrying a real sword and actually doing his best to behead you, you would be in trouble.*****

Straw-man arguments are tempting to create because they make proving a thesis so damned easy. It is not difficult to argue that the SUV is not going to cause Earth to explode tomorrow. It is not hard to claim that a strong Canadian dollar will not lead to a second Great Depression. Setting up your imaginary opponent as hysterical, unreasonable, and wrong is a simple process, but it is also an unfair one and will lead to your readers taking you--not the opponent--less seriously. To refute a straw-man argument, a real opponent will only have to say, "I've never claimed any of that garbage."

Make sure that you have a real counter-argument. If it's a convincing one, you'll have to work hard to refute it. Many writers rely on straw men because they simply don't want to work hard. Wake-up call: there are no short cuts. You want to learn how to argue convincingly? Stop trying to cut corners. You're not fooling your readers; you're fooling yourself.

Other Business:

1) I've finally got around to creating an e-mail address that a) doesn't have my real name in it anywhere and b) does not include the name of a character from Winnie-the-Pooh.****** You can find the contact link in my profile (at least one person already has). Those who long to tell me what a horrible person I am for metaphorically slapping poor undergraduates upside their metaphorical little heads but don't want to leave public comments can now get started.

2) It's that time again. It is, in fact, time for some updates on

The Filthy Plagiarists' Roll of Dishonour

The plagiarists have been busy this week. They are making me really, really angry.

essays on the impact of reading writing and speech

To be fair, this person could simply be doing perfectly legitimate research for a paper. To be considerably less fair, she probably isn't. Most legitimate researchers would search for articles, not essays, and they would do so on article databases designed for the purpose. This little toad is searching for essays. She also has no idea how to do a Google search. Most of the plagiarists don't (see below for one truly wonderful example).

Hello, people: the words "on," "the," "of," and "and" are not helping you here. Why are you including them in your search? Are you insane as well as evil?

essay show how bilbo is a hero

This one comes from the young gentleman who gave us "thesis and example in body paragraph about bilbo hobbit" and "bilbo such a hero transition to next paragraph in the hobbit." He hit the main page again. If he actually read it, he probably saw me insulting his search terms. Hello, Hobbit Boy: do you ever give up? Why has it taken you two weeks to find anything on this subject to steal? The Internet is strewn with information about heroism in The Hobbit. You are not simply a cretin; you are a persistent cretin. Go away, sir.

elizabethan photo paragraph of writing describing it

What the hell is an Elizabethan photo? There were no cameras in the Elizabethan period! Y'know those pictures of Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and Sir Walter Raleigh and all those people you see all over the place? Those are paintings.

hobbit thesis

Admittedly, this person could quite innocently be searching for dissertations on J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. I'm expecting probably not, however.

descriptive essay about my aunt

You, Ms. Plagiarist, are the human incarnation of Laziness. She's your aunt. Go have tea with her. Take her for a stroll through some garden somewhere. Describe her yourself. Why would you have to steal a description of your aunt when you could actually write it yourself in about thirty seconds, you oozing, bottom-feeding piece of animate slime?

process analysis essay on sandwich

The process analysis essay on the construction of a sandwich is a favourite first-year set topic. It is probably fairly easy to plagiarise. That said...it's a sandwich. All you have to do is describe how to make one. Why are you incapable of going to the kitchen, making yourself a sandwich, and recording the steps? It will probably take less time than it will for you to find and plunder someone else's description, and you'll get a sandwich out of it.

thesis statement of batman essay

This wart is the second Filthy Plagiarist who has been set a Batman topic and has decided not to use his brain. You get to write on Batman. On Batman! What is wrong with you? Why are you not writing on Batman? I shall smack you!

4 page concept essay on aliens

The "aliens" topic is almost as popular as the "Batman" topic. This idiot has actually specified how long her stolen essay has to be. Have fun with that, Nasty Thing Stuck to the Bottom of my Shoe.

expository essay on the importance of having integrity

AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *snort* *gasp* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

examples of introdction [sic] of an essay on how to begin writing a essay describing a room to someone who has never s

This search term goes on for so long that it actually exceeds my statcounter's ability to contain it. I expect the last two words were originally "seen it," though given this plagiarist's capacity for long-winded Googlocity, there may have been more.

Dear little plagiarist...you don't know how to use Google, do you? You are trying to steal your essay, and you don't even know how. I wish you luck. You're going to need it.

an observations essay about parakeets birds

Here's an idea for you:

Go observe a bloody parakeet.

One further note:

Inevitably, people are starting to play with my statcounter, entering ludicrous search terms just to see whether they can bring up my site. Some of the searches above may be from such people, though I don't think so; I can generally tell when someone is a repeat visitor. A couple of my online acquaintances did spend a happy half-hour fiddling with Google one evening; they found my blog with search terms ranging from "kem abuses sandwich devotees" to "kem is really batman and bricks sandwich devotees resulting in their impending doom," not to mention, "kem is canada's merciless monster."*******

However, my favourite of these attempts came from a person from Pennsylvania who had visited the site nine times before. This enterprising reader found the blog with a number of fairly ordinary searches such as "plagiarize frodo friends" and "useful descriptive essay writing phrases," then ended with, "mock Kem the Merciless plagiarize."

This search record may constitute the first ever instance of Satire Via Statcounter.

Nicely done, faithful reader...nicely done.

*A rather learned drinking game might involve a political debate during which all the watchers took a sip every time a politician used a logical fallacy. Everybody would be roaring drunk in no time.
**Profs and teachers are always setting essays on global warming and the abortion debate and other such hot-button issues.*** They only realise how terribly foolish they have been once they are two or three sentences into the first paper.
***Long, long ago, when I was in high school, the hot-button issue of the day was euthanasia. When I trotted this example out before a bunch of high-school students last year, they looked at me as if I had gone mad. I had to explain the term, which they had never heard. I must be Getting Really Old.
****An opinion I do not share, by the way. Like many fervent Canadian environmentalists, I was brought up in BC. I learned to recycle cardboard before I learned to walk. When I went to Kalamazoo for a conference a couple of years ago and found myself in a university that had no recycling bins, I suffered. Oh, how I suffered.
*****Probably the really fatal kind.
******Not that I have anything against Winnie-the-Pooh. I love Winnie-the-Pooh. Mostly, the problem is that I never check that address.
*******One of the terms was much, much dirtier than any of the others. Let's just say that it involved the words "fingers" and "wet" and leave it at that.

Qualify This "This" or Face the Consequences

I don't have time to tackle the whole narrative mode tonight, but I can at least fit in a Grammatical Moment, plus an introduction of an exciting new feature that will allow me many opportunities for sarcasm. Actually, however, "Grammatical Moment" is not the right phrase here; this post constitutes a Structural Moment or an Anti-Vagueness Moment or a Moment in Which Kem Can Rant about Syntax, but it does not, strictly speaking, deal with grammar.

I would like to spend some time screaming about the word "this."* "This" is a useful little word. It is also a lazy little word. Writers use "this" as the syntactic equivalent of a Swiss Army knife. Want to refer to a vague, general concept you have covered somewhere in your last three sentences? This is not unusual. Want to avoid actually having to tell your readers what your subject is? This is easy. Want to drive your poor readers around the freaking twist?

This is what you are doing by using "this" as a demonstrative pronoun.

"This," "that," "these," and "those" can be used as pronouns. In informal writing and speech, they work well. If someone tells you that your sister is very good at spelling, you may reply, "That's true." Everyone listening will know that "that" here stands in for "your sister is very good at spelling," the utterance to which you are directly and obviously responding. Replying, "That statement is true," would add an unnecessary word to the conversation and convince your friends that you were an absolute idiot.

In writing, demonstrative "this" is problematic because it's not always possible to tell what it's standing in for. Take this passage:

Maria's boot-heel was lodged firmly between the ties. She tugged at her laces, but they were wet and tight; her fingers slid over them uselessly. Closer, now, the train whistle blew. This was not going well.

What was not going well? Maria's walk as a whole? Her problem with the boot? The blowing train whistle? It sounds as if "this" refers to the whistle, but if it does, the passage doesn't make very much sense. The "this" must refer to events before the blowing of the whistle...but which ones? All of them? Some of them? Could "this" be Maria's entire life?

"This" is a vague word. Moreover, "this" is a cheating word. If you want to gesture wishy-washily towards your last few sentences without specifying exactly which ones you mean, you use "this." Informally, the method is acceptable in moderation. Formally, it isn't, mostly because formal writing must be crystal clear. Every unqualified "this" is another fraction of a second the reader will spend going back over the writing to figure out exactly what is being said. The more backtracking the reader does, the harder the essay will seem to read.

I have marked passages that looked rather like, well, this:**

In "Something Different," Joyce is an attorney with a dark secret. This is important because the story revolves around the fact that the legal profession is not as honest as it sets itself up to be. This contrasts with the theme of "Impact," in which a lawyer's honesty provides the key that unravels the central mystery. If one takes this into account, one realises that the second story is actually a sort of sequel to the first. This means that Harper is moving gradually towards a personal trust of the law.

This "analysis" is actually horrible dreck that deserves to be flushed down a toilet that hasn't been cleaned for twenty years.*** The writer**** jumps to conclusions, makes huge leaps of logic based on sparse or no evidence, does something bizarre in the bit about the second story being a sequel (why is it a sequel? How do you know? Good grief, Fictional Kem), assumes she understands the author's intent, and simply doesn't say anything intelligent at all. However, her idiocy is helped along by the constant "this"ing. The first "this" could refer to Joyce being an attorney, Joyce having a dark secret, Joyce being an attorney with a dark secret, or "Something Different" being about an attorney named Joyce with a dark secret. The second "this" could refer to the first "this," the fact that the first "this" is important, the story revolving around the dishonesty of the legal profession, or the dishonesty of the legal profession itself. I could go on, but you probably get the picture. The writer***** isn't entirely sure what she's talking about, so she sticks a few gigantic, meaningless "this"es into her text and hopes that the reader gets the right idea, whatever it may be. The reader, in the meantime, ends up lost in a sea of confusion.

What the bleeding hell is "this"? Answer the bloody question!

If you must use "this," qualify it. You can cite "this passage" or note "this concept"; you may discuss "this character" or critique "this sonnet." Better yet, get rid of the "this" altogether. Write about "the concept Harper introduces here" or "Joyce's idea"; refer to "this sonnet" by its name (if it has one). Do not use "this" unqualified in formal writing. All it tells the reader is that you are too lazy to write more precisely.

The Filthy Plagiarists' Roll of Dishonour

In my last (unexpected)****** post, I railed against the filthy little plagiarising jerkwads who had been searching on Google for material to steal and had in the process stumbled across this site. Since that post--three freaking days ago--I have caught seven more filthy little plagiarising jerkwads. We seem to have entered hunting season. Very well. It is time, say I, to start a Filthy Plagiarists' Roll of Dishonour******* on the left-hand margin of this page. On this roll will be recorded all the disgusting bottom-feeders I have noticed being stupid on the Internet. I hope they are chased by very fast zombies and forced to defend themselves with cricket bats that they do not have.

I should explain that people who may not be plagiarising--for instance, those who simply enter the titles of certain novels or plays--will not be included on the roll.

Today's inductees are:

all that is gold does not glitter analysis

This young parasite apparently feels quite strongly that thinking for yourself takes too long and involves far too much, well, thinking for yourself.

5 paragraph essay aliens

You have to write a 5-paragraph essay on aliens, and you're going to steal it? Your teacher is letting you write on aliens, and you can't think of anything to write? What is wrong with you? Do you need a brain transplant? I shall happily give you one.

essay thesis on batman

Okay...again: your teacher is actually encouraging you to write on Batman, and you are planning on stealing your ideas? Are you completely insane? I would happily write essays on Batman for the rest of my natural life. May I slap you? Please?

bilbo such a hero transition to next paragraph in the hobbit

This walking, talking rodent dropping is the same person who searched for "thesis statement and example paragraph about bilbo" a few days ago. Our friend here is actually going through his essay section by section, searching for extremely specific bits to pilfer. He is writing a Frankenessay. I want to eat his brain.

I am happy about the fact that this guy's second search led him directly to the main page of my blog, on which was prominently displayed--you guessed it--the anti-plagiarism post.

useful narrative essay writing phrases

You freak of nature. I don't suppose you have ever considered dreaming up a few original phrases yourself? No...didn't think so.

descriptive writing, describe a woman

I hope this person steals the Wilkie Collins passage. Holy mackerel, do I ever hope that. It is a fairly famous passage. It would also be considered rankly sexist by most modern high-school teachers and university professors.

subjective and objective words describing a girl

This search turned up a few hours after the "woman" one. I'm beginning to get the sense that all the writing instructors in the world are setting the same assignments this week, and that all of them are due on Monday. At any rate, I hope this moron tries to steal from the Collins as well, though she will be much harder to catch if she does.

Honestly: you have to find words that describe a girl. Why can't you do so on your own? Are you less intelligent than the average four-year-old?

Next time, there will, I'm sure, be many new and exciting plagiarism attempts to mock. For now, just direct your righteous fury at the ones listed on the Roll. I wish I could say that I didn't think there would be many more of them, but that--unqualified--would be a lie.

*The words "that," "these," and "those" fit here as well.
**I am writing informally and can use "this" as a pronoun if I like. Neener-neener-neener.
***Don't worry. I wrote it just now. I am insulting only myself, and frankly, I deserve it.
****I.e., me, but role-playing as a first-year undergrad.
*****Me again, still role-playing.
******Even to me.

Attention, All Plagiarists: I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING

You know what really bugs me?

You know what really, really bugs me?

You know what makes me so freaking furiously and utterly irrationally angry that I am tempted to cast everything aside, find a lance, and ride around the countryside tilting at particularly offensive-looking windmills?

You do. Yes, you. Yes, I am talking to you, Evil Person Who Has Been Attempting to Plagiarise an Essay and Has Somehow Stumbled Across This Blog. I know exactly what you're up to, and I am not bloody amused.

I have a statcounter. It counts stats. It also tells me where all my readers are coming from, as well as--get this--listing the search terms they have used on Google to find the blog. Some of these search terms are quite enlightening. Let's take a look at them, shall we?

explain frodo and his friends relationship

Gosh. Hello, little student. You wouldn't possibly be plugging an essay topic into Google, would you? I'm sure that your interest in this topic is completely innocent and that when you have glanced studiously over my blog and noted the information about friendship in The Fellowship of the Rings, you will cite me in your bibliography!

thesis statement and example in body paragraph about bilbo hobbit

Even better. You, my friend, are clearly so determined to write an exemplary essay that you are combing the Internet for documents that involve not only your topic but its very structure. You are an inspiration to us all, sir.

essay on fear

...'cause I'm sure you're just looking for stuff to cite.

write a three to four-page essay that explains what writing and/or reading can mean in a person's life

What an enterprising little grasshopper you are. Look at that: another entire topic inserted into Google! I am terribly, terribly sorry that I cannot provide you with the essay for which you are searching, and I do hope you eventually find something to steal. Er, cite.

essay in support of colloquialism

Dude, ur sooo awesome! I hope ur like able to like find some info to like hand in and stuff!

descriptive essay about dinner

I feel your pain. How difficult it would be to write a descriptive essay about dinner all by yourself! Who can describe dinner? Dinner is rare and mysterious and cannot, in fact, be described by a mere undergraduate or high-school student. No wonder you are looking for inspiration online.

descriptive writing ants*

Ants! Those elusive, elusive creatures! The people who expect you to describe them are cruel and unreasonable. Steal away, little student; steal away.

There have been other such entries, but alas, they have fallen off the bottom of my stats list. I do remember a lot of Lord of the Rings material and at least one query regarding Edmund Spenser, but I did not think to record any of this information for posterity. In the future, however, I'm going to write all these babies down.

STOP. FREAKING. PLAGIARISING.

What the hell is wrong with you? Can't you spend an hour brainstorming instead of wasting the same time stealing from the Internet? Do you have any idea what an idiot you're being? Oh, sure, you've managed to "complete" your assignment in a fraction of the time it would have taken you otherwise. Well done. Have you learned anything? Well, you're probably pretty damned good with Google now...but have you learned anything else? You think you're pulling the wool over your marker's eyes. If you get away with it,** you are...but you're also doing an excellent job of pulling the same wool over your own. Won't it be wonderful when you stroll out into the real world after cheating your way through high school and university and suddenly discover that you have no skills at all? Stop. Cheating. You aren't helping yourself in any way.

What's that? You were just borrowing ideas from a website? Web content is free to all, and you should be able to borrow as much of it as you want?

WRONG ANSWER.

If you "borrow" an idea from your best friend, you are plagiarising. Plagiarism constitutes the unacknowledged use of words or ideas that are not your own. "Common knowledge" is rarely an excuse unless you're working at a sky-is-blue kind of level. It doesn't matter where you have found "your" ideas; you always have to cite them. Your teachers are going to back me up on this one, so don't go whining about how noooobooooody eeeeveeeerrrrr toooooooolllld yooooouuuuuu. IIIIIII DOOOOOON'T CAAAAAAARE.

Teachers, professors, and markers:

Certain of your students have been coming to this blog in search of information on The Lord of the Rings, The Faerie Queene, and other sundry subjects. Some of them may try for The Woman in White soon. Other of your students have been very good and have simply been searching for information on how to write essays well, but a few aspiring cheaters have made it here.

I am a terribly vindictive person whose great loathing for plagiarists is legendary amongst the undergrads of my home institution. I am thus going to blow off steam by setting a trap for the pestilential little maggots who wander the Internet, searching for material to rip off. If you are not a plagiarist, feel free to watch. If you are, be aware that the Wrath of Kem is currently heading rapidly in your direction.***

Google away, plagiarists. I hope that your searches pull up the following sentences:

In Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth stands as an example of steadiness and good sense, whereas Jane is flighty and embodies both the "pride" and the "prejudice" of the title.

Hello, Demonic Plagiarising Student. Go ahead and steal this sentence. I dare you. I double-dog-dare you. No...I triple-dog-dare you. Laugh at me and base your essay on this statement.

Few know that the title character of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is actually the protagonist's dog, which accompanies the monster on his journey of self-discovery.

Hello again, you swine. Go on...take it. There it sits, inviting theft.

Statistics Canada confirms that 86% of high-income Canadians are likely to raise morbidly obese children.

Miscreant, greetings. Accept this nugget as my gift to you.

The badger typically builds nests in trees and feeds almost exclusively on fungi.

It's yours, my hideous little canker-blossom. Use it in an essay. Put it in the introduction.

I'm onto you, plagiarists. I'm following you with my insanely glaring electronic eyes. I do not like you, Sam-I-am. I do not like your essay scam. I do not like it here or there. It should not happen anywhere.

*You may be gathering by this point that a lot of people are writing descriptive essays right now.

**Plus if you're stupid enough to hand in an essay you've found through Google, you're probably not going to get away with it. I'll let you in on a little secret: markers know how to use Google too.

***The Wrath of Kem is a physical entity with knives for eyes and extremely large, painful Fists of Inescapable Doom.

Bibliography

Just a note: today's real post is just beneath this one. It is much, much longer. Much. Much. Longer.

Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. London: Penguin, 1974. Description.

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. 1719. London: Penguin, 1965. Body.

Finnbogason, Jack, and Valleau, Al. A Canadian Writer's Pocket Guide. Second edition. Scarborough: Thomson Nelson, 2002. Formality.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. London: Longman, 1977. Conclusion.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Fellowship of the Ring. Second Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Nothing.

Yes, It's a Tree; WHAT ELSE Is Important?

I'm back. No, I'm not dead. Marking took over my life for a bit there, as did procrastinating and prevaricating and running with scissors. I was going to write this entry last Friday, at which point a new character leapt full-grown into my comic strip and demanded that I pay attention to her. She had better be bloody well worth it; that's all I can say.*

However, here I finally am, whether you like it or not. It's time to talk about the descriptive mode.

Unless you are stuck in a first-year essay-writing course, you may never have to write an entirely descriptive essay. First-year essay-writing courses are famous for forcing students to learn types of essay writing they are never going to use again and skimming over types of essay writing they are. However, learning how to write a good description is not a useless endeavour. There are descriptive elements in most essays. Students excel at writing extremely bad descriptions, and most of them probably have absolutely no idea why their markers are constantly scribbling "Vague," "Wordy," "Inaccurate," and "Could you elaborate...?" in their margins. The truth is that a mastery of concise, accurate description can improve both an individual paper and a writer's rhetorical skills in general.

Description is an important element of fiction, but it is also essential to non-fiction. Descriptions of processes, objects, people, and works of art are often necessary if a writer wants to give his audience background on his chosen subject; some essays do assume that the audience is familiar with the subject at hand, but those that don't can rely on description to fill the gaps in the reader's understanding. This gap-filling does not substitute adequately for first-hand knowledge; no matter how accurately a writer describes a sculpture, the image she creates in her reader's mind is probably going to differ at least slightly from the real thing. A picture is worth a great deal more than a thousand words. Nonetheless, if a thousand words is what you've got, you had better learn to use them as best you can.

Here is a picture I took myself a month or so ago. I do not know the name of the person in it, though I do know that she is 1) an astrophysicist and 2) braver than I am. Pretend, for a moment, that I have asked you to describe this picture to me:

A lot of people would describe the photograph as follows:

A person is sitting on a log between two cliffs.

Gosh. You've got me there. A person is indeed sitting on a log between two cliffs. Ta-da. End of story. Can we go home now?

No. We. Can't.

If I walked up to you and said, "Picture a person sitting on a log between two cliffs," would you imagine this exact photograph?** Would your imaginary "person" be positioned just like the real one? Would this person be male or female? Dressed or undressed? In the foreground or in the background? Clear or hard to see? How big would the log be? What would the cliffs look like? Would they be close together or far apart? Would there be anything else in the picture? Trees? Moss? Sky? Where would the light be coming from? What season would it be?

The art of description depends quite a lot on the art of seeing: of noticing not just what is there but how it appears in relation to what surrounds it. Looking and seeing are two different things entirely. We tend to take in general details and edit out specific ones; many of us*** have a hard time recognising even people we have met recently or see frequently when these people appear in unfamiliar contexts. When I go to draw a particular scene, I like to have it in front of me because I know that no matter how well I think I know it, if I try to draw it from memory, I will leave something out.

Yet to write in the descriptive mode, you have to work against the impulse to edit out details. You may have the object you are describing in front of you; your reader won't. Your objective is to create a strong, lasting, and relatively accurate impression in his mind. You actually want to show him whatever you are describing.

There are many ways to accomplish this sort of thing; different ones are called for in different situations. The two main branches of the descriptive mode are the subjective and objective forms of description. Both are useful, and both can cause the reader to form vivid impressions of the object of the description. However, they have different purposes.

An objective description of the photograph above might be:

The picture was taken by someone standing in a gorge; the camera points up between two dark grey cliffs. The cliff on the left extends about a third of the way into the photograph. It has moss growing sparsely on its lower portions. The cliff on the right also extends about a third of the way into the photograph, and the way the light is striking it makes its extreme rightmost portion appear light green. The tops of both cliffs are visible; the left-hand one is silhouetted against a white sky, but the right-hand one gives way to a canopy of bright green leaves belonging to several trees growing from the top of it. One thick branch extends from the right-hand cliff to the left-hand cliff. It forks about halfway across the gorge. In respect to the frame of the photograph, this branch appears about a third of the way from the top of the picture. Smaller branches, covered with leaves, surround this larger limb. In the distance, extending along the right-hand cliff-top, are many other trees, though they seem to blur into one another. About a third of the way from the bottom of the photograph--behind the extended tree limb but in front of the trees in the distance--is a log that bridges the gap between the cliffs. It seems to be about the breadth of the waist of the person sitting on it. She is framed against the white sky; the light is behind her, making her difficult to see clearly. However, the proportions of her body--large hips and slender arms--argue that she is female. She is straddling the log quite close to the left-hand cliff (perhaps three-quarters of the log is behind her to the right and another quarter ahead of her to the left). Her head is obscured by a clump of leaves, but she appears to be looking towards the left-hand cliff. Her legs swing free, and her left arm--the only one visible--extends slightly ahead of her and down to where her hand (hidden behind her left leg) may grip the log. She is wearing dark blue knee-length trousers and a white sleeveless shirt.

I could go on (about the cliffs, the trees, the exact position of the moss, etc.). I could describe this scene so thoroughly that you wouldn't even want to see the picture. However, I think we've got enough to work with.

Notice that the objective description relies entirely on the writer's observations: not his interpretations or speculations, but his observations. When he is not sure exactly what he sees, he explores why (for instance, note the bit in the passage above where the writer discusses the human figure's obscured head). His observations have no particular emotion behind them; they are as unbiased and neutral as possible. He is painting his word-picture through accuracy of observation. In fact, his main objective is to be as accurate as possible.

Yet the above description is pretty bloody boring. I just proofread it, and I zoned out five or six times in the process. Its relative accuracy would help someone who needed to paint the scene; it would make everybody else throw the description violently against the wall.

A subjective description provides a vivid impression of whatever is being described through the object's personal relation to the writer. A subjective description of the scene in the photograph above might be:

There were three of us in the gorge when I snapped this photo of Liane's friend crossing from one cliff to another on a log bridge. Only the friend is visible here, but there were others on either side of the cliff, egging her on and warning her back. We stood and watched apprehensively as the girl--seemingly fearlessly--scooted across to safety. She was dressed in a white shirt and blue pants, and she appeared to us outlined against a white sky and a spreading canopy of leaves. The dark, damp cliffs loomed over us, throwing us into shadow while the girl sat in the sun, her legs dangling into the empty air. My camera caught the one moment of danger; then she was gone, safe beyond our sight, and we were left hearing the others laugh above us as we gazed at the trees and the sky.

Here the writer, in describing the photograph, speaks of the experience of taking it. Many details are left out, but she still creates a version of the scene that will leave an impression on the mind of the reader: she mentions the perspective from which the photo was taken, the position of the girl on the log, the presence of the trees, the colour of the sky and the darkness of the cliffs, and so on. However, she also gives details that relate, personally, to her interpretation of the scene. She says she and the others are watching "apprehensively" and that the girl is crossing the bridge "seemingly fearlessly"; she feels that the girl is in "danger" and later "safe"; she describes the cliffs as "looming" (personification: cliffs do not, in reality, "loom"); she keeps drawing our attention to her own position down in the gorge, though she herself does not appear in the photograph. Because she is describing the original event itself, she can also access details that the writer of the objective description cannot: for instance, the sounds of her friends' words to the girl. She also focusses on the girl, giving only a brief impression of her surroundings. The objective writer starts at the edges of the photograph and works in towards the middle; he might also have chosen to start at the left and move right or at the top and move down. He does not privilege one element of the photo over another. The subjective writer does.

This passage is more vivid than the other because it offers the writer's personal connection to the scene. However, it is also less exact. Though it leaves the reader with a clear mental picture, it is a picture of the writer as much as it is of the scene. A painter who created the photograph from the above description would probably come up with something whose details differed from those of the original, though the subject--and the spirit--of the picture would remain intact.

When you are writing a description, you need to negotiate between objectivity and subjectivity. Sometimes one is more appropriate than the other. Sometimes you need a mixture of both. Circumstances dictate what sort of description you need to write. However, in an essay-writing situation, it is usually safer to err on the side of objectivity. "That girl looks almost exactly like my aunt" may be an extremely accurate description that would hold great meaning for someone who knew your aunt. Someone who didn't would find it subjective to the point of uselessness. You are not describing the girl for your own benefit. Even if you are writing a largely subjective description of her, you should go on to explain how the girl looks almost exactly like your aunt. In the process, you will cover the details of her appearance, and even people who have never met your aunt will be able to picture her.

Be aware that comparing anything to anything else can be useful but also dangerous. "A ukelele looks like a small guitar with four strings" will give many people a pretty good idea of a ukelele's appearance...but not those who have never seen a guitar. Don't get complacent and assume that others' experiences are identical to yours.

Another mistake that writers sometimes make is to forget that the good old axiom "Show, don't tell"**** does not simply apply to short stories. Take the following "description":

Robert was angry.

We all know what it means to be angry, right? When you're angry, you smash china figurines in the fireplace and rant about how much you hate your mother.

...Or you close doors very gentle and firmly behind you, and when you speak, your voice comes out in a flat, dead-sounding tone.

...Or you smile and pretend to be delighted while you clench your fists so hard that your knuckles whiten.

...Or you bottle it all up inside and let loose hours later in a profanity-laden e-mail to your sister.

...Or...?

"Angry" is an abstract word. It means something slightly different to every person who uses it. "Beautiful," "huge," "contemptible," "soft," "terrified," "horrible," "ridiculous": all of them are telling words, not showing words. A planet can be huge. So can a house. So, in fact, can an ant...compared to other ants. Some people see flowers or trees when they think of "beauty"; others see certain types of women; yet others see guitars or buildings or eighteenth-century shoes. If you want to describe Robert's anger, describe it. Tell your readers what he does or says or looks like. As a description, "Robert was angry" has about as much value as "The building was tall." Angry in what way? How tall? Compared to what? If you use an abstract term, follow it up with an explanation.

As well, don't forget that you actually have five senses, not one. If you describe the bleeding hell out of an alpine meadow but forget to mention the smell, you are neglecting an essential element of the scene. Such an omission is just as serious as the one a student of mine made when she described the yellow flowers in a painting but forgot to mention the human figure in the foreground. Give the reader the whole picture, not simply the portion of it you noticed when you were only looking and not seeing.

A good example of a description that successfully mixes subjective and objective elements to create a memorable picture in the reader's mind is this passage from Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860):

My first glance round me, as the man opened the door, disclosed a well-furnished breakfast-table, standing in the middle of a long room, with many windows in it. I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window--and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps--and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer--and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!

Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted--never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead. Her expression--bright, frank, and intelligent--appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete. To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model--to be charmed by the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost repelled by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped figure ended--was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream. (58-59)*****

Collins was writing his serial novel right after--and for the same periodical in which was published--Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities,****** so the extreme length of this description is probably not surprising. What is interesting about it is how Collins creates the picture of the "ugly" woman, Marian Halcombe. He begins with a brief but clear description of her surroundings, then effectively "zooms in" (this was before film, but the effect is similar) to the woman framed against the window. The subjectivity of the description comes through in the sequence in which the narrator describes the scene; he does not move objectively from left to right or top to bottom, but starts large and then focusses on the element he views as being most important. He also doesn't describe Marian all at once. His description is limited by the angle from which he can see her, and his first impression of her is summed up both in the abstract terms "beauty," "grace," and "perfection" and in the narrator's descriptive elaborations on these abstractions. By withholding the detail of her face, he centres the reader's anticipation and attention upon it and creates a certain mild suspense, which is relieved when he finally reaches that surprising abstract word: ugly.

At this point in the description, every reader should visualise what is, to him or her, an ugly woman. The shock value lies not in Marian's actual appearance but in the unexpected introduction of a subjective word that holds a specific personal meaning for each individual. However, the narrator doesn't leave it there; he outlines Marian's looks in detail, in the process showing us what she actually looks like and what he considers ugliness to be. He ends with a subjective but memorable comparison of Marian's contradictory beauty/ugliness to a dreamer's inability to reconcile the dream world with the real world. This final comment does not add to the description, but it does contribute to the reader's overall impression of the encounter by positioning this beautiful-ugly woman as almost monstrous: an unsolvable nightmare conundrum who is trapped between categories.In other words, every word counts. It's sometimes a little too easy to regard essay writing as "functional" and believe that as long as it gets your general point across, any combination of words will do. Descriptive writing demonstrates the falsity of this idea. Word choice, word order, sentence construction, order of ideas, emphasis of words and phrases, repetition, punctuation, figurative language: everything works together to draw a picture. Different configurations create different pictures. Using more words is not always ideal, either; remember how horribly boring the huge objective description above was. Concise and evocative is often the way to go.

You think I'm talking out of my rear end when I say that "Since the dawn of time" is not an acceptable phrase with which to begin an essay? Stop thinking out of your rear end. Words are important. "Since the dawn of time" means "since the dawn of time"; it is not code for, "Don't pay attention to the first sentence of this essay, which is formula and not really important." If you use stupid words and phrases, your writing will seem stupid. If you use vague words and phrases, your writing will seem vague. If you jumble words and phrases together any old how, your writing will be confusing, and your markers will tear out their hair and eat it.

The descriptive mode is a good one in which to work on preciseness of expression because it is, in a way, the mode behind many of the other modes. A pure description is not an analysis, but it is often a jumping-off point for analysis. When my art students begin to learn to analyse works of art, their first job is to describe these works; only when they have learned to see do they move on to meaning. An incomplete description makes for an incomplete analysis. The student who missed the human figure for the flowers would have had problems analysing the painting without acknowledging that figure; if she had, her interpretation would probably have constituted a misreading. Clear and accurate description is more likely to lead to clear and accurate analysis.

Descriptive essays are often termed "expository"--they are meant to inform the reader rather than to argue a point--but the truth is that even descriptions can contain arguments. They are not, however, always as structured as the arguments in persuasive papers; a descriptive thesis is sometimes implied rather than stated outright. Some of my students have just been asked by their prof to provide descriptions of imaginary rooms that they themselves must design. These rooms must make their occupants feel safe. Each student will therefore have to create a thesis revolving around why and how her room's design conveys safety; this thesis will be stated in the introduction. However, other students with a different prof are going to have to describe significant experiences in their lives: experiences about which they felt differently years later. These students will probably embed their theses in their descriptions themselves, conveying why and how their feelings changed through subjective details about their reactions. Descriptions allow scope for creativity. Adhering to sandwich method will not help you here; you would do better to fall back on your creative-writing skills. Remember that your main objective is--for whatever reason--to create a clear, memorable picture.

The next time I somehow manage to get my butt in gear and write in this blog, I'll probably be dealing with the narrative mode, which is quite like the descriptive mode, except with more action scenes. I may take a grammatical detour first, but we'll see.

*I can't ask you if she is because I am once again months ahead of myself, and she won't be appearing until November.

**Assuming you hadn't seen it yet, of course. If you had, you would probably say, "What an amazing coincidence! I was just reading this blog that went on and on about a photo of a person sitting on a log between two cliffs. I think our minds are connected." Then I would hit you.
***Me included. I once failed to recognise my second cousin when we met accidentally on a bus perhaps two days after we had had dinner together. The poor guy talked to me for twenty minutes before I was able to discern from hints in our conversation exactly who he was.

****Writers of fiction have been bludgeoned over the head with this one almost literally since the dawn of time.

*****For the full reference, see the bibliography, which I am about to create.
******The novel with the famous opening. You know: the one that goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on about times being good and bad and wise and foolish and light and dark and all sorts of other stuff that basically adds up to absolutely nothing at all, deliberately.