College Writing 101

I have this class twice a week. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I spend ninety minutes listening to my English professor try to explain to a bunch of 18 year olds what Plato meant in his Allegory of a Cave (or some other such stuff).

For the first half of the semester, I was the only person that ever spoke in class. The others sat there like lumps on a log. BORING.

Anyway, another part of this class is writing papers. We have written two papers so far: the first was 1000 wordsand it was a review of one of the articles we had read in class; the second is an argumentative paper and is 1500 words.

We write the paper and then hand it over to our classmates to look at and critique. After they have destroyed our writing, we revise the paper and then turn it in for a grade.

With my first paper, I let me classmates have at it. I wrote about Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. They destroyed my paper. Said it was organized all wrong and everything was written wrong, blah, blah, blah. I then sent it to my dad (who is a professional student). He told me my organization was fine according to him, but I should listen to those in the class with me as they should know what the prof is looking for.

I even went to the "Reading Lab" and had a Senior look at my paper. He also said I needed to move stuff all around.

So I did.

And I got a C-. The prof didn't like the paper at all.

So this time around, I am writing about my friend Penny and her son Austin. I am writing a paper to try and convince someone to help buy them a handicap van.

I sent it to my parents first. They both loved it. Dad said not to change anything other than some typos and grammatical errors.

My classmates said I needed to change all sorts of things. They told me I needed an argument of some kind (I don't know what I would argue...they seemed to think I needed to do a paper that was for or against something like Prostitution!).

I have decided to ignore my classmates. I think it is an excellent paper. If anyone wants to read either paper, let me know. I will email them, but not post them. They are way too long to post.