Do It Before It's Too Late
I can never be accused of being a difficult man to deal with, even when I'm trying to be difficult. I'm pretty easy going, and I always try to consider others' feelings. I especially do this when I have to submit work for others to read and critique. But often in life you find that others don't do as you do. Why is that? Are others oblivious to common courtesy?
My case in point, my Creative Writing classes final papers. When I had to turn in my final paper, I tried to not only write an interesting story, but I also remembered to keep the paper short. This was the formula I employed through out the entire semester: short, to the point, no more than 10 pages. Following this blue print, my longest paper was only 10 pages, while my shortest paper was 7 pages.
This also seemed to be the understood practice for the entire class. No other classmates wrote papers that were uninteresting or too long. That is except for one person. When the class had to review this girls papers, both times she produced papers that far exceeded every other classmates paper, not in content, but rather in length.
While her first paper was only 8 pages, she used both the front and back of those 8 pages, which in reality adds up to sixteen pages. Since this was her first paper, no one in class made a big deal about it. Yet we'd hoped,by the time she had to turn in a second paper, that she would have been a little more considerate in the length of her work; she wasn't.
In her last paper, turned in on the final week of the semester, the length was 18 pages. Eighteen pages! Eighteen! Luckily this time it was only on the front pages, but still, eighteen pages on the last week of class!
Never in my life had I wanted to curse out someone, yet here I had to fight the urge for three classes. And to top it all off, she wrote an impressively depressing paper. Not only was it long, it made me terribly sad. Some may call that convincing writing, but as for me, I call it mean and cruel to do in the last days of a semester.
My case in point, my Creative Writing classes final papers. When I had to turn in my final paper, I tried to not only write an interesting story, but I also remembered to keep the paper short. This was the formula I employed through out the entire semester: short, to the point, no more than 10 pages. Following this blue print, my longest paper was only 10 pages, while my shortest paper was 7 pages.
This also seemed to be the understood practice for the entire class. No other classmates wrote papers that were uninteresting or too long. That is except for one person. When the class had to review this girls papers, both times she produced papers that far exceeded every other classmates paper, not in content, but rather in length.
While her first paper was only 8 pages, she used both the front and back of those 8 pages, which in reality adds up to sixteen pages. Since this was her first paper, no one in class made a big deal about it. Yet we'd hoped,by the time she had to turn in a second paper, that she would have been a little more considerate in the length of her work; she wasn't.
In her last paper, turned in on the final week of the semester, the length was 18 pages. Eighteen pages! Eighteen! Luckily this time it was only on the front pages, but still, eighteen pages on the last week of class!
Never in my life had I wanted to curse out someone, yet here I had to fight the urge for three classes. And to top it all off, she wrote an impressively depressing paper. Not only was it long, it made me terribly sad. Some may call that convincing writing, but as for me, I call it mean and cruel to do in the last days of a semester.
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