Burplefrog!

Look! This comment my lecturer wrote on my essay totally made my day, because I've never gotten a comment like that before. Mostly I get stuff like: "well-thought out essay" or "good structure and organisation". But "beautifully written"? That's like in a whole different league.

Although personally I think (and I'm not trying to be self-deprecating here) it wasn't that great an essay. It was on neo-corporatism, which involved lots of me trying to make sense of long tables of economic data and also trying desperately to remember how Keynesian and monetarism work. I'd also photocopied a bunch of stuff from several books and read most of them, underlining the bits that I thought would be helpful in writing in my essay. When I needed to actually type out quotes, though, I realised that there were too many underlined bits and I needed some way of differentiating the less important underlined bits from the really important ones. I decided to dog-ear the pages so I could find the crucial parts more easily. What actually happened was that whenever I needed to quote something I started rifling through increasingly dog-eared pages muttering, "I KNOW I came across it just now when I was looking for that OTHER quote WHERE IS IT ARGH." In case you're wondering, this was the essay that resulted in me not being able to distinguish 151 from 95.

I also wasn't expecting much from this essay because yesterday, during tutorial, our lecturer told us that our writing sucked and we needed to know how to improve it. The way she did this was to extract bits of our essays that lacked citations, were grammatically unsatisfactory, or just plain messed-up, stick them all onto a Word document, and then print them out for us to critique collectively. I think she said something like: "I know your parents probably give you a hard time about this in JC and secondary, but I really think this is something we need to do." Can you feel the chill dread that struck all our hearts when she announced this? It was chilly. And dreadful.

She also harangued us about the use of the conditional "would" in our essays. As in like, "I would argue that..."
("I don't know if this is just a Singaporean thing, like maybe you think it sounds formal or something? But to me it just sounds wrong. Like: 'I would argue if...you pay me?' It just sounds waffly. Use 'will'. 'I will argue in this essay...'")

And then about the word "mentions". I was feeling pretty guilty about this, because I've actually used "mentions" more than once after I ran out of things to say. I also thought my essay was doomed.
("Why are you saying, so-and-so mentions this? 'Mentions' implies a casual remark, but the kind of people you should be quoting aren't "mentioning" anything, they're arguing or discussing! Use that instead.")

Um...I've kind of forgotten the point I wanted to make. I guess it's probably something like: Don't use "would" and "mentions" in your essays anymore.