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Author Topic: What is the most insulting comment a professor has ever written on your work?  (Read 19803 times)

flamingtangerine

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I once heard a story about a professor at oxford who wrote "Your work is both interesting and original, however the parts that are original aren't interesting and the parts that are interesting aren't original."

As for me i think the worst comment i've received is that i was glib when analysing a picture of an obese child eating McDonalds. To be fair i did describe the child as a "bloated monster with a look of cherubic ecstasy smeared across his face like so much special sauce" or something like that.
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Juvy

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"You understand all the concepts and participate fantastically in class, but i'd wish you'd hand in your work on time so I wouldn't have to fail you."

lol I think C+ was considered to be an amazing mark in that class, I did not learrn anything except how to use french curves and t-square like my life depended on it. Stupid design class.
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evernew

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"you should become a fiction writer because most of this is fiction."
- on my history exam

to be fair, i had compared greek heroes to the terminator and other movie characters
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Lila

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"I think you might want to switch to another language - Latin is obviously not your forte"

I had gotten a 62 on my Latin final and my teacher was sick. But she had been sick for a week and a half before the final, so I couldn't talk to her about my questions, so I did really badly. I'm still in the process of fixing the grade even though it was last june.
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KvP

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maybe i am being overly cynical and generalizing here but i really think it was more because these were silly people who don't read books and never had any incentive to learn proper english cos of microsoft word and spellcheck and all that. it's a little implausible that almost an entire class of white, middle class, privileged kids failed a very simple grammar quiz because every single one of them had a learning disability.
This. Holy balls, Word has made it easy to slack off. I've always been a florid writer (my style of composition formed around 8th grade and hasn't really changed) so I took care with these things, but other people I know just didn't care. My best friend from high school is a pretty smart guy, so it came as a massive shock to me when he had me proofread an essay of his in college and it was maybe 4th grade level, spelling and grammar wise. When I confronted him with it his excuse was "I've got spellcheck!", despite the fact that the program only picked up about half of his grammar errors, some words were incorrectly changed, and overall the essays were just constructed out of shit. And where's spellcheck when you're faced with an actual written assignment?\\

I about punched him in his Czech face.
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Barmymoo

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In my english class last week we were all in hoots as the teacher read out particularly choice phrases from one girl's essay (the girl in question was also laughing her head off, she knows it was a bad essay). She referred to King Lear as "that bloke" and used the phrase "and other stuff". The problem is that most people don't read enough formal writing to know how to use it. It's also not something we're properly taught at school here, and when you reach eighteen and can't write an essay without resorting to colloquialisms, there is something wrong.

That said, even I struggle when I read an article in the Times referring to a woman living "without a hint of unction or moral hauteur". Who exactly uses these words? I mean, really. Unction?
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There's this really handy "other thing" I'm going to write as a footnote to my abstract that I can probably explore these issues in. I think I'll call it my "dissertation."

pwhodges

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While I know unction has that secondary meaning, I would prefer the word unctuousness in that position; but I can't conceive of writing that sentence anyway.
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Spluff

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That just sounds like they used a thesaurus without actually understanding the word.
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KickThatBathProf

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Oh, well, I guess the Times writes like a college freshman then
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-Karamazov-

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Formal writing has really begun to go down hill.  When ever I have a group project, I am usually the one who volunteers to put together everyone's individual parts.  I do this because I enjoy editing the paper and I like to see the final product come together. Another reason is I do this is because I just don't trust some of the other people with the task.  After seeing some people's writing styles, making a group paper sound coherent is pretty hard. 

There was a kid in my last group, his idea of formal writing meant using the thesaurus to make every short and properly used adjective long and superfluous.  However, he still directly addressed the reader and kept referring to himself.  I highlighted all the mistakes and emailed it back to him along with a link to a formal business writing guide.

I think the most annoying thing is when someone writes a well thought out paper, but the style is so radically different from the other parts that you need to go through word by word to make it flow.
« Last Edit: 14 Nov 2008, 09:16 by -Karamazov- »
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Barmymoo

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The editor-in-chief of our student newspaper (newly formed, or rather resurrected) has asked me to be the editor and I'm fairly sure it's because she knows that I can adapt informal writing to be more suitable for print but am not so great at actually writing articles. I'm really looking forwards to it actually; I just hope that I'm given a fair amount of flexibility in editing because frankly, most of the staff are doing courses that don't involve a whole lot of formal writing and I don't want to print a load of rubbish.

That said, I'm in awe of anyone who can write an article that doesn't sound like the love child of a Joanna Trollope novel and that Times article. I would be a terrible journalist.
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There's this really handy "other thing" I'm going to write as a footnote to my abstract that I can probably explore these issues in. I think I'll call it my "dissertation."
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