Quote of the week
The late David Foster Wallace, in the Caveat emptor section of his syllabus for Pomona College’s English 67 (Literary Interpretation), circa 2005:
Your instructor has high standards for the written work you turn in. Take another close look at Course Rules & Items 4 and 7 on page 3 of the syllabus. I know that many professors say this kind of hard-ass stuff at the beginning of the term but don’t actually mean it or enforce it as the course wears on. I, however, do mean it, and I will enforce it — feel free to verify this with students who’ve taken other classes with me. If you want to improve your academic writing and are willing to put extra time and effort into it, I am a good teacher to have. But if you’re used to whipping off papers the night before they’re due, running them quickly through the computer’s Spellchecker, handing them in full of high-school errors and sentences that make no sense, and having the professor accept them “because the ideas are good” or something, please be informed that I draw no distinction between the quality of one’s ideas and the quality of those ideas’ verbal expression, and that I will not accept sloppy, rough-draftish, or semiliterate college writing. Again, I am absolutely not kidding. If you won’t or can’t devote significant time and attention to your written work, I urge you to drop E67-02 and save us both a lot of grief.
I have no reason to doubt that he meant what he said.
(Via Kim du Toit.)
dogette »
17 October 2008 · 7:13 am
I’ve written before that one of my favorite essayists was/is DFW (esp. the title essay in his collection, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” — that’s some major funny right there). Never made it through Infinite Jest. Maybe someday. I would have loved to have taken one of his classes. I can’t imagine what crap the good English profs (if there are any left?) see today; much less what they allow to PASS.
fillyjonk »
17 October 2008 · 7:51 am
Considering the crap that I see as a biology professor (and then get the complaint of “But this isn’t an ENGLISH class!”*), I also wonder what the poor English teachers (or even worse, the teachers-of-Creative-Writing, who are supposed to educate the people who want to be the next generation of novelists) have to read and grade.
(*Next time someone pulls that, I swear I am handing it back to them and saying, “Tiens, maintenant, ecrivez-la en Francais.”.)
McGehee »
17 October 2008 · 11:31 am
I hate to imagine his chances of getting tenure these days, with such backward notions.
Jeff Brokaw »
17 October 2008 · 11:52 am
It’s pretty disturbing that a college teacher feels compelled to offer such dire warnings about failing to turn in, you know, college-level work.
Maybe if clowns like Bill Ayers weren’t so focused on teaching radicalism in Ed school, some of this problem would go away. Huh. Kinda crazy, but it just might work!
sya »
17 October 2008 · 10:11 pm
I never had to take any English courses in college. But I did take a couple of creative writing courses and I took some time crafting stories. Then again, I actually enjoyed those assignments. Who knows what I would have done if I were forced to explicate, in 10 pages, some literary “masterpiece” that I might have privately considered dreck.