Got an F on a college essay for swearing?
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brianjones
Member
weve reached the pissing contest portion
Either this, or you could just become the president and give grades to yourself. Whatever seems easiest to you.
Widdle Puppy
Banned
Your professor is a fucking dope. An f? No. Maybe one letter grade down.
A Fish Aficionado
I am going to make it through this year if it kills me
dont plagiarize
Mister Wilhelm
Member
That kind of language has no place in a formal academic paper, OP. Even if it's an opinion piece.
It's trashy and devalues your own opinions by making you appear more emotional than calculated.
I wouldn't have failed you but I would've given a stern warning.
It's trashy and devalues your own opinions by making you appear more emotional than calculated.
I wouldn't have failed you but I would've given a stern warning.
At least we can agree on that. I'm not sure why you're splitting hairs over the distinction between what essays and lab reports are though. We probably have very different conceptions of what an essay consists in.
Spikematic
Member
Yes, let's all continue making lame jokes at the OP's expense now. You guys need to grow [the fuck] up as well.
You've since clarified that you aren't and I apologize if you took that as belittling you, I honestly got that impression from what you are saying. Though that just makes your understanding even more worrisome.
I think science is a wonderfully useful tool to learn about the word around us. I don't have a problem with science. I have a cultural problem with the lay understanding of science, and also with scientists whose culture strengthens and disseminates pretty problematic approaches to understanding what they are doing.
Meanwhile I don't think I'm projecting. You pretty clearly called one of my fields "nonsense thoughts and feelings." Are you really sure there isn't a blatantly obvious superiority complex going on here. You also essentially just said that writing is dumb and scientists don't need to learn how to do it better. Which frankly is a stupid thing to say about any field.
I get that scientists are particularly sensitive to any perceived attack, maybe if the disciplines went back to a broader liberal arts education more of them would have the argumentative equipment needed to actually stand and argue with people from other fields. For now the vast majority just hide behind the edifice that is constantly coming down before them.
The fact that you have no opinions about the fundamental nature of your discipline and it's culture is also worrisome. How can you understand what it is you're doing? What the things you're saying actually mean?
We need more critical thought, not less. Advocating for less then slinking away when anyone calls you out on it is clearly a problem.
I'm not confusing them as I have a pretty specific purpose in doing that. I also don't call people that write popular history historians.
I'd argue that's something fundamentally different that being a scientist, though obviously these people work with science.
Most historians of science go further. Scientists are able to get their point across to other scientists, almost never to lay people, because they have an extremely specific methodology and language along with a specific culture in which a number of language moves are understood as meaningful and permissible without actually saying much to anyone that isn't of that culture. It's not just jargon either, but a fundamental insular communication. There aren't that many problems with that in the abstract, but it practice it's made understanding what scientists do very difficult for others and essentially impossible for scientists.
The case in point here is the entire discourse around replicability.
Markitron
Is currently staging a hunger strike outside Gearbox HQ while trying to hate them to death
Lab reports are impersonal statements about your objective, experimental procedure and findings. What little opinion you can express in your conclusions can be factually wrong and will be marked accordingly. I can't define an essay for you but I imagine it's pretty far removed from that.
Funny story: In first year I elaborated a little too much on a report and was told to 'stop trying to be Stephen King'.
F- see me after class
llien
Banned
Accepting one work with "fucks", but not another doesn't sound right.
Telling student to avoid such words would be the best way, lowering mark just a bit would be somewhat acceptable. But F (worst mark possible?) doesn't feel right.
There are plenty of examples of using "swear words" in literarture.
Oh, and Putin just banned swearing in arts so your text would be illegal in Russia, OP. (not sure if should bother you though)
You sound as if it was a good thing.
Bulgakov wrote his famous "Master and Margarita" in Soviet Russia, but in times when there was no censorship. In early ears commies remembered bad times of Tsar regime.
Telling student to avoid such words would be the best way, lowering mark just a bit would be somewhat acceptable. But F (worst mark possible?) doesn't feel right.
There are plenty of examples of using "swear words" in literarture.
Oh, and Putin just banned swearing in arts so your text would be illegal in Russia, OP. (not sure if should bother you though)
You sound as if it was a good thing.
Bulgakov wrote his famous "Master and Margarita" in Soviet Russia, but in times when there was no censorship. In early ears commies remembered bad times of Tsar regime.
Camp Freddie
Member
This.
Maybe you can avoid good writing style if want to be an analyst all your life, never going beyond writing lab notes, but most science jobs need you to communicate your hypothesis and provide well-structured arguments to support it.
You don't just list a bunch of facts and expect other people to interpret them for you.
Plus, there is more to science than lab reports. Things like literature reviews and position papers require a good writing style.
Learning the "third person passive voice" style in science is not especially different to learning the styles required in humanities subjects. I don't think any history or media studies graduates are going to go with first person active voice vernacular descriptions (unless they're quoting others).
Much as I am tempted to write an equivalent of "Electonic Band Structure in Germanium, my Ass", I feel I must refrain.
Sorry to pile on here but every single one of these sentences is badly written in a different way. Your teacher was being kind by telling you that it was for the swearing.
"I've came" in college? Really, man?
Unless you are going to Trump University that shit's not gonna fly.
Why not? Context has meaning. At the most basic level we have the use vs mention distinction. Historians use curses and bawdy language all the time, but they are almost never our own words.
I guess, but frankly this is incredibly obvious stuff and the fact that the OP didn't pick up on what writing for school is like by the time he is in college is a problem.
I wouldn't, and haven't, marked down for such things at all, but that professor probably feels, not incorrectly, that the student fundamentally failed to do the assignment. If a student turns in windings he will probably get an F, if a student uses a wildly off register to write his paper then it's up to what purpose the teacher thinks papers serve. In a lower level class many think the paper is there to instruct students on how to write "academically", big scare quotes.
But the OP wasn't writing literature. He was writing literary review. That's something else entirely.
He's not saying it's a good thing. Nothing about that makes it seem good. He's just saying it's inevitable. Social and cultural forces will always impact the things we create.
LMAO this is so bad. Reads like entry level high school shit. You earned that F bud.
Shadax the wizard
Member
Markitron
Is currently staging a hunger strike outside Gearbox HQ while trying to hate them to death
You accuse me of having a superiority complex then make massively ignorant and condescending points like this? The bolded is particularly arrogant and massively irrelevant to about 90% of scientists. Your qualifications serve to get you a good job. After that you will likely be locked into a field for the rest of your life, and all of your mental resources go there.
And about the 'thoughts and feelings nonsense part', I didn't mean that to be offensive (I can see why it is), but I meant it from the point of view of a scientist so apologies on that one.
For reference, I consider this an essay, and in my mind it has the same rigor and impartiality as any scientific paper - it makes a claim, presents evidence for that claim, and arrives at a conclusion through deductive reasoning.
Eh, historians use the first person all the time, the active as much as possible, and the vernacular occasionally. Humanists and Humanistic Social Scientists tend to be particularly aware of what they are doing with language on a level beyond the direct literal communication. As a result they often follow, breach, or ignore an increasingly weakened protocol for specific reasons.
The first person is a particularly good example of this. It has a clear and obvious rhetorical ends and it's often used to for those reasons. Even by scholars as famed as E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill often used it.
Dark_castle
Junior Member
Next time use "blank" instead of "fuck". For example, I blanked your mum last night.
Markitron
Is currently staging a hunger strike outside Gearbox HQ while trying to hate them to death
Really? This does not leave room for any creative thought or writing style, it's a relatively sterile document. Don't essays involve opinions that can be criticised?
Personally I'd find that even more offensive.
malboroking
Banned
I'm sorry, but I'm gonna call shenanigans on your entire argument. Why have classes for anything? Just read a bunch of papers on the subject and you'll be more than proficient. Your presentation of your arguments show that maybe you should have paid more attention to those "useless" writing classes.
Markitron
Is currently staging a hunger strike outside Gearbox HQ while trying to hate them to death
This is absurd way of twisting my point. Just because you read something does not mean you can understand it. Learning practical lab skills from an experienced supervisor is essential. Proficient English to write a lab report is learned with repetition, and that level is all that is required for most scientists.
Also, I didn't have any writing classes in college which was my entire point in the first place.
The secret is to use "fornicate" so that they know you are a scholar
malboroking
Banned
You just said that all the writing skills you need can be gleaned simply from reading reports.
Learning practical writing skills from an experienced supervisor is essential.
Your exact quote was: "You will read a tonne of academic research papers in your time which will more than prepare you to begin to write one."
I have a direct quote of you saying a field is nonsense. Moreover you seem to fundamentally misunderstand what I was doing there, which makes sense because you don't think its worth thinking about. I'll give you a hint, scientists don't actually think the fields of the history and philosophy of science is "nonsense" as you say. They actually think both things are incredibly important, unfortunately neither say the things they want them to say.
Again you should work on your reading comprehension, if it's arrogant, it isn't as I'm not saying anything about myself, I'm certainly not making any claims there about its relevance to 90% of scientists in that post because it's quite clearly directed at you.
This isn't an excuse, I do a lot of thinking about things that aren't history. There is a cultural issue in the sciences at play here. Nothing about being a scientist means you can't take other fields seriously especially the history and philosophy of science. Scientists used to be this way, they were deeply embedded in a strong liberal arts curriculum. They've lost something important, and all intellectuals have suffered as a result.
You literally called a field nonsense, I'm not sure how that's supposed to not be offensive to people in that field or people that think it's important.
Well that's the problem isn't it. The history and philosophy of science are deeply important to the fields, to contextualizing them, to understanding what they says, to understanding what they do, to understanding how and why they work. To place them in their relationship to the rest of the arts. All scholars of the liberal arts are natural allies.
It is neither all the is required, there's a lot more going on here, nor all that we should expect. But it makes sense that when you actively disagree with the idea that scientists should try to understand what they are doing that you would miss this. Maybe this could serve as evidence for why you should be more open minded.
Again you aren't just disagreeing with people's ideas about these things, your disagreeing that it's fundamentally worth knowing. That's honestly crazy to me.
BlazingDarkness
Member
That's not good enough! Two hours for a university level essay, are you serious? You need to be spending more like 20 hours writing it up, and that's after having fully familiarised yourself with the material.
You should be spending two hours just on the referencing at the end, but oh wait, you didn't include any references!
You need a clear thesis in your opening lines, and then to constantly refer back to this in order to develop your argument. You need to quote directly from the media text, and include quotations and paraphrasing from secondary (scholastic) sources to further develop your argument. Don't use contractions, don't use colloquialisms, and don't fucking swear!
It was a rush job and also poorly written. Step up your game and learn to write properly - fit for purpose.
Palette Swap
Member
Sorry for piling on, but Im surprised this actually passes for a sentence Their use of literary devices in their poems, which shows exactly how and why both of these pieces of literature are love poems.
llien
Banned
But it's the same context
Incredibly obvious, you say?
Shocking figures: US academics find 'dramatic' growth of swearing in books
I'm strongly biased against those teaching literature, I realize, and that's not how I see what has happened.
Dear Prof has seen something he/she didn't like and decided it is appropriate to misuse position of power to punish OP for doing that. For F to be warranted, essay would need to be F even if you replace swear words with euphemisms.
I might be missing what "essay" is.
I don't think academic essays have to be creative or "stylish" - they're theses backed by evidence and argumentation (much like scientific papers). There is plenty to critique in the Gettier paper - it didn't spawn an entire subfield if it were trivially true (or false). The difference is that what they're critiquing aren't subjective opinions, but gaps in the argumentation. This is not very different from critiques of academic papers over gaps in methodology. In my experience, academic essays are much closer to this than they are to New York Times op-eds.
excelsiorlef
Member
Holy shit
I'm going to blow your mind
Base Academic Language Expectations are in fact not comparable to Russian Governmental Censorship
excelsiorlef
Member
DP
Totally meaningless as I addressed in the part of the post below. He isn't writing literature, he's writing for his English undergraduate writing class. There's a different expectation there.
"I greatly dislike this group of experts that I [not that this is directed towards you personally just the vast majority of people have no idea what academics do] probably have essentially no understanding of so I'm ignore the context that they are indeed experts when evaluating what they do"
I'm sure there are problems in the field, but you're literally admitting that you have some issue with these people and then proceeding to evaluate what was done in the worst way possible because of that.
The professor literally gave someone a grade, it's not to "misuse" a "position of power" to give a student a grade on the assignment based on what they did in the assignment. Did you see what he posted? It was horrible on it's own. It also completely misunderstood the register it should be using demonstrating a lack of understanding his audience. Seeing the paper as a total failure is probably harsher than I am prone to, but it's hardly outlandish.
This logic doesn't make sense. We can easily extrapolate it to, for an F to be warranted the essay would need to be an F even if we replaced all the poor writing and analysis with better writing and analysis. This isn't a matter of principle, it's a question of degree. It's a bad paper. The question is how bad, I wouldn't say F if its a Freshmen core English class, otherwise it's absolutely an F, but I also don't do literature.
I guess you are, because it isn't literature in that sense of the word. "Academic", really undergraduate level, writing is fundamentally different than creative writing.
A certain amount of technical abstraction is unavoidable in scientific discourse because that language simply facilitates much more efficient communication between scientists. But I'd argue that I don't think it's a fundamental insular communication, as you put it. There's a lot more that scientists can do to make their work more accessible to lay people. I'm not sure what part of the discourse around replicability you're referring to, but it's a perennial topic that flares up every now and then.
guybrushfreeman
Unconfirmed Member
What? That makes no sense whatsoever. Not swearing in an essay is a standard that goes far beyond the OPs professor. I would say the OP got a F because they failed to write an essay at all.
If youre asked for a University level essay and hand in a blog post instead then you failed the assignment. Its a F because OP didnt hand in what they were assigned to
BlazingDarkness
Member
This is basically what an academic essay is.
Your thesis and methodology.
Your findings (be it through your own fieldwork or sourcing secondary material).
Your conclusion based on those findings.
It's actually not at all far removed as you might have thought.
You would also be criticised for over-elaborating in an essay, it must be concise and have both depth and brevity. Maybe your idea of essay writing is a bit misguided.
snickothemule
Member
Keep trying opie, at times growing pains are real, but you will continue to improve over time. Don't let this destroy you, I want to see you succeed. You're at college for good reason, keep taking advantage as much as you can.
I'm drifting into the Anthropology of science which is certainly not what I study, but by fundamental insular communication, I don't mean that it by nature of the subject must be those things. Instead scientists have created multiple different cultures that share some fundamental mutual intelligibility but that are otherwise insular. That's why so much of the writing and practice of science is picked up from actual experience working in the culture. This can be improved, but it would require active work to change the culture of science. Which isn't particularly likely when many scientists steadfastly deny that there is/are a culture or cultures of science.
Replicability is the sacred cow of science. Many scientists feel that their legitimacy comes from it, this is incorrect now but it was once at least theoretically true. So the discussion around it is central, but in practice it almost never happens. Scientists simultaneously praise, critique, and do not practice replicabaility outside of specific crises.
Of course the sciences gain their legitimacy in the same way that every other expert field does. By being a group that controls membership, trains its members, has internal rules and structure, and that is socially acknowledged to have primacy over a topic which normally theoretically derives from its internal rules and structures. There's a great paper, which is roughly book sized, on how this is declining due to the lay association of technology with science and science's attempts to distance itself from the rest of the arts. I believe it's something along the lines of "The Primacy of Science over Technology in Modernity and Technology over Science in Post-Modernity", I can look it up for anyone interested tomorrow.
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