What's New Now?

Would 20 half pages work?? Triple spacing may help .
Well, I never said I would be a good help .

 

Just write any old 5000 words of trash, Josh. Or, I could write the essay for you ... unless you are sitting on a GPA that is honours grade the odd the D or F isn't going to affect your graduation chances.

The art of success in life is in knowing which tasks are pointless are not worthy of effort. College is a disappointment and a failure at preparing folks for life, because it removes the mysteries by telling you ahead of time what value each task has. On the other hand it is possible that the fore-knowledge has some point anyway. There must be many undergraduates who chase themselves out of an upper-class honours by wasting effort on too much trivia rather than in nailing down the important shingles. Remember that the "golden children" -- the little gods -- whose every action, deed, and grade is A++, who excel at everything they touch, who speak 3 languages fluently, who play 3 musical instruments to concert grade (and is a virtuoso on at least one of them; capable of playing in any musical style or genre), who could've have been a professional sportsman in either of your nation's national sports, who almost made the Olympic triathlon team ... heh. See how easy it is to waffle, Josh? Those folks are boring farts who end up in politics or law because nobody actually likes them all that much.

5,000 word essays are easy. The test is not to produce a literary gem, nor even a cogent argument. The point is to establish that you were present when the assignment was handed out (or that your class mates like you enough to pass the intelligence on). If you can manage the first 1,000 then you are home and dry. The next 3,000 should say the same as the first 1,000 only with more adjectives ... twice as many and replace all the nouns with compound two and three word ones (for example don't say: frightening result, say: terrifying and ghastly conclusion to the process. 2 words become 7. Your tutor isn't going to actually read your essay anyway ... well, he might if you make it too grippingly interesting, but if you do that you'll be getting an A anyway and headed for nerd country on the first available flight. I remember doing exactly what I described when I was at university for a class I had gaily missed for a whole semester because it so dull. Even though the tutor porbably had no idea who I was, he gave me an A- for my essay and he must have read it all, because his comment at the end "you paint a bleak picture of the future" showed that he had indeed both read my essay, and not read 'The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. Oh, the class was called The Environment and The Future ... pretty snazzy and prescient for the 1970s, huh? My essay predicted a future obsessed with the atmosphere.

 

Josh you are way too trusting.

Spoof it and risk getting an F. An F won't kill your prospects of graduating but fretting over too much work will (sooner or later) make you ill. Nothing is more precious that you health and self-respect. If you genuinely feel the assignment is an unfair imposition, which is not conducive to your studies then put your ire to work and write 5,000 words of total crap (preferably along the lines: my professor is an arse, he is inhuman and stupid and his faults are as follows ....) If you stick to the truth as you see it then he cannot fault you for libellous comments (assuming he actually reads it), the worst he can do is give you an F. Will one F cause you you to fail? Or are you sitting on near perfect GPA? If so, quit hiding your light beneath a bushel and boast about it. But I withdraw my sympathies because such a star pupil is clearly used to being stretched and your professor is obviously doing exactly the right thing.

One line responses are not enough, by the way. Your lastreply gives no indication that you actually read my previous post properly. Merely skimming it to get the gist is insufficient ... that'll be exactly what your tutor will do ... he will only delve deeper for more meaning in those few articles that appear to have something genuinely interesting to say. The rest ... so long as they appear to be on topic ... will get B's (plus or minus) depending on how neat they appear ... a few with biblographies that include the right reading list tomes will get A- and anyone who has peed off the tutor recently will get a C.

 

Whenever I wring my hands and tell my husband that I need to write something but don't know what to say he just rolls his eyes. He tells me to sit down, pick up the pencil and put words on paper. (He writes a lot in his job.) For my stories I often have absolutely no idea what I'm going to say until I sit down and start typing. It's the first sentence that's the toughest of all.

And, yes, I've written papers for college, long ones that kept me up all night. I remember getting an A on what I thought was a really stupid effort, and a B- on one I put a lot of thought and effort into. I can't believe that any college professor is seriously going to read 5000-word papers from...how many students? He'll skim them, probably looking for key words, mostly his own, regurgitated by you.

Oh, and p.s. My son, who does computer graphics, was hired today by Big Huge Games which has offices here in Maryland. Rise of Nations is one of their games (I never played it. ) Apparently, Hunt Valley here in Maryland is headquarters for at least three game companies. Big Huge is one of them. Firaxis is another one.

p.p.s. And yes, I'm bragging. I'm very proud of him.

 

That may be true, but not for ALL professors! Back in my college days, I decided to test that theory about whether or not the profs really read all the papers, so in the middle of a 30 page paper on Charles Dickens, I threw in the line: "Charles Dickens, who was a well-known necrophiliac..."

The prof simply wrote in the margin, "Really? I was unaware of this." Thus, he proved that he did, indeed read our papers!

PS - I got an A- on that paper!

 

LOL Sacha. It really does depend on what the teacher's like. I know all my teachers very well. For a few of them, it's the first and last couple of pages that matter and I can write absolute bull (mostly directly copied off the internet -- rid of links and other stuff obviously) in the middle and still get good grades. Most of them, however, read every little detail and some even bother to check if you've copied it all off the internet too. (I got really busted one time, but apparently the rest of the class had done the same so I didn't get into too much trouble for it. )

So, Josh, I feel for ya. Write with double spacing with really BIG handwriting, using extra long spaces in between words -- but still making it look natural, of course. If you're teacher comments on the double spacing say, "I thought I'd space it all out to make it look extra neat" or something. I, my friend, am the master of the arts. I can copy something off the internet and turn it into something that looks like my own. But maybe that stuff only works when you're about my age.

Good luck!!

 

Muffin, dear. 5,000 words are still the same number of words no matter how they are spaced. If you use double spacing you will just end up with 40 pages.

I am sorry but I still don't see the problem. If Josh hasn't got 5,000 words to say on the subject then maybe he needs to change majors. Being at college is a choice, one that always involves, sometimes, tedious academic chores of the literary kind. Get over it already, or make a stand and complain in style.

 

Oh sorry, I thought we were talking about needing to write 20 pages.

And anyway, the professor might have second thoughts on the 5000 word essay if someone hands in 40 pages.

 

LOL, Sacha, Nice one. However you have not proved that he was merely skim-reading it. If I was skimming 30 pages about Mr. Dickens, the word necrophiliac would stab me in the eye without even trying. However, anyone who is both brave enough and sufficiently inventive to do such a thing, would undoubtedly have written something that was above and beyond the humdrum. I suspect that your tutor read the whole thing, quite fascinatedly, and with relish.

I'm still waiting for Josh to justify his angst over his own imposition. If he is not a good, natural writer then such a task is a chore and an imposition, and is not likely to enhance his overall grades. On the other hand the chances that it will seriously degrade his academic record is moot -- at worst -- and decidedly unlikely at best.

 

Sorry, still don't see a problem. Or are you suggesting that you can't be expected to know anything about telecommunication because that is what an introduction course is supposed to teach you. Isn't that what research is supposed to be for? I don't know that further education in the US is not substantially the same as in Europe -- in that its main point is to produce adults capable of sustaining a wide variety of interests and abilities and to be able to source the materials with which to remedy such knowledge gaps as, from time, become apparent to them.

It sounds to me as though the prof is making two distint points, both of which you are missing. Firstly he is seeking evidence of your capabilities in outlining the subject you are proposing to be become more expert in; secondly he is fairly plainly setting a stiff enough task to be sure that none of you are under the illusion that since the admirable Messrs. Morse and Bell the only thing to be said about telecommunications is that it has gotten a lot more sophisticated in both hardware and bandwidth.

Jeez! I must've written close to a thousand words in these few posts. Wossup widya?

 

I think the important thing here is that it's an INTRODUCTION class. If it was an advanced class on telecommunications then a 20 page paper is not unreasonable as you should have more knowledge and depth on the subject. An Intro class is normally just to cover the basis and get you warmed up to the subject and it normally covers a wide range of the topic. In all my intro college classes I think the longest paper I've had to write was about 8 pages, my more advanced classes were the 20-30 pages.

I think it's unreasonable for him to be expecting a 20 page paper out of an intro class when his students don't even have that knowledge yet.

 

When I was at uni all those years ago o), homework assignments were somewhat of a mystery in terms of how they would be marked/assessed. Maybe it was just my uni or maybe it's how it was for everyone back then but nobody knew what the profs were really looking for. No explanation or breakdown of assessment criteria or descriptions of what would merit an A, B or C grade. It was guesswork mostly.

These days, the assessment criteria for assignments tend to be clearly labelled and you should have a clear knowledge of what is expected for each grade. Therefore, you should see what it will take to achieve a C, or how much more you need to do for a B or an A. Josh, does this prof's assignment have clear objectives and an analysis of what is required for each grade?

I'm a perfectionist by nature, but I'm also a terrible procrastinator. Or should that be a wonderful procrastinator, because I'm so good at it? Anyway, as a result of that I used to leave the assignments until almost the last minute then nearly kill myself with intense pressure to do the assignment to my usual 'perfectionist' standard. Nothing less would do. But then I realised that in the end it didn't matter anyway - some things you will work at like crazy and get a C, yet others you will barely work on and get an A. It happened to me - I got an A in Climatology (only barely understood it for the 2 weeks I worked on it and thought I had written erroneous drivel) yet I worked hard on another assignment for weeks and only got a C.

What's laughable is that 4 days before one of our science finals, one of our new profs realised he had taught us the wrong syllabus for a whole term. With just 4 days to go, he basically told us to memorise some formulae for respiration and some key facts that would get us through the exam. We had not studied it until that day, and all I remember of that was something about Co-Enzyme Q. I have no clue now what we memorised back then because it was merely 'in one ear and out the other' for the sake of passing the exam.

Anyway, while I've been reminiscing, I've realised I'm waffling. That's a good trick to use to make up the words - waffle. Seriously though, don't worry so much about the word count - like Mirelly said, you can expand the word count easily. Once you've done a project plan and started writing, you'll find that the word count is not really an issue - you should have plenty to talk about. Content-wise, if this is an introductory course, the prof can't expect you to be an expert on the matter, or why would you need to take his class anyway? I'm assuming he wants to see your research skills and to see if you have made the effort to learn about the subject and grasp the key points/issues. Remember last year when you mentioned the Nazca lines task to me? After a few hours of researching it myself online, I found out quite a bit about the subject - certainly enough to outline the key points and to expand on a couple of them in more detail, and that was only from online sources.

If your prof is nit-picky, he is nit-picky. Hence, don't waste too much time on perfecting this assignment. He will find something to be nit-picky about regardless of how hard you work at it so accept that he will make criticism anyway and work that into your mindset. How many marks does this assignment carry as a % of your grades? If it has a big weighting on your overall grades due to its 5k wordcount, then you can be justified in putting more effort in to ensure a good grade. If it has equal weighting/status as smaller assignments, then I would do enough for a pass and polish your smaller assignments instead.

Not sure if I'm making sense now as I'm totally zonked and should really head to bed before my head hits the keyboard.

reuigfruqyieyfdaos;k.chjkd;hypuiq;a.

*thud*

 

Hugz, you crack me up. :rotfl:

 

Josh: re the paper... five pages five pictures. a picture is worth a thousand words.