The School Thread

One thing that is frustrating about the new writing instructor: the imposition of a rigid paragraph structure for all research papers. She described the paragraph structure she wants to see (basically: intro sentence, sentence setting up quote 1, quote 1, sentence analyzing quote 1, sentence setting up quote 2, quote 2, sentence tying quotes 1 and 2 together) and made it very clear that deviation from that structure will be punished. Now, I get the need for this kind of rigidity as a pedagogical tool. Frankly much of the writing you see out of college students today is godawful; the imposition of such a rigid framework can only help. Nonetheless, I'm someone who is - when I put my mind to it - pretty good at writing. What's more, I've worked on developing a distinct voice in my writing and I'm pretty proud of that; I've had instructors tell me that they could blindly pick my paper out of a selection of 100 papers, just on the voice. Having such a rigid structure imposed on me just crushes that, it reduces writing - which is supposed to be a creative endeavor - to a formula, and that's something I absolutely hate. Like I said, I get the need for it but oh do I ever chafe!

To punish her, I'm thinking of writing my research paper on the most boring subject I can imagine. I might just subject her to a ten page overview of modern monetary economics. Dry and boring and awful and guaranteed to put her to sleep at least twice but technically flawless. TAKE THAT.

I would say that rigidity in format can be a problem, but in some ways it can be analogous to having to obey genre conventions or journal requirements (or poetic forms, for that matter). Because it's a ten page paper, it should be relatively easy for you to find a way to exploit the form to produce something original that remains true to the requirements of the assignment.

In my own work, I'm frequently given revisions that require me to go far out of my comfort zone in response to people that-while they have experience and seniority on their side-do not necessarily have my long-term writing goals clearly in mind when they offer them. The process of molding them to my goals is usually productive. This is a big improvement over my previous approach which was to rage against the machine and do what I wanted anyway, which I have plenty of time for now that I'm doing a lot more independent work.

Oh totally, like I said I get the reason for the requirement; some (OK, all) of the writing I"ve seen during peer review sessions has been downright dreadful. Like doesn't even understand basic sentence structure dreadful. In the vast majority of cases the imposition of this kind of formula will be a huge benefit.

Like I said, I'm just chafing at it, and that's more of a reflexive thing than anything else. I'll do what I can to do to have some fun with it though. Your "exploit the form to produce something original..." is my "put the instructor to sleep while earning an A". :)

While I'm thinking about the limits of college essay formats: I really don't like the whole "your essay should be an argument" thing that most college writing seems to take for granted. I get the value in being able to create and support and argument, but I also find the format somewhat limiting. Probably this will come as a surprise to many who are familiar with my P&R oeuvre, but in general when I engage with new ideas I tend to like to explore them more than argue them. I've read no small number of essays, and off the top of my head I can't think of any argumentative style essays that number among my favorites. As a result, my instinct when I do research and write essays to equivocate; "This may be so but also maybe this and maybe that," as opposed to the traditional college essay format, "This is so."

LIke I said I do get the value in the typical "create a thesis and argue it" format, and I also get that the emphasis on the format is borne out of a triage process among competing priorities and it reflects the reality that the vast majority of students are going to take the bare minimum number of writing courses that they can get away with so you might as well do the best for them that you can. I also acknowledge that I'm not a traditional student (I even have the official non-traditional student flag on my college account to prove it). Nonetheless: frustrating!

It's mainly because it's easy to grade in a manner that adheres to a superficial rubric and allows the instructor to get away with a minimum of thought towards the balance of content and craft that they teach; since everyone else does it, they all sink together. If you're frustrated, it's not because you're the asshole.

That's an awful cynical way of looking at it!

I think it's more just that teaching people to write is hard; the only way to get better at writing is to do lots of writing and reading and uhh most college kids have better things to do in their spare time. Instructors can provide some guidance along the way, and in lower-level writing courses (which, despite being a 300- level class, this definitely qualifies as) imposing some structure. The stuff I've read from my peers in the class really is dreadful; a total mess. Like, the worst kind of word salad; obviously just a recording of every thought vaguely relevant to the subject at hand in an attempt to hit the minimum page requirement with no real sense of coherence or larger purpose because to them the purpose is to hit six (or four or eight or whatever) pages. It sounds like I'm slagging on my classmates and I kind of am but also I'm not, or at least I'm not doing so without a great deal of sympathy. Writing is hard and it's something that takes lots of practice and for the typical transfer student who's going to take the bare minimum of writing classes necessary to graduate, the imposition of a rigid structure will almost certainly only represent a dramatic improvement.

I don't think most teachers/professors are the asshole, either, fwiw. But systemically, it's an asshole. Writing is hard but it's not rocket science, and the fact that most introductory-intermediate level classes stress a prescriptive formula for masking flaws rather than a gradual approach to working with what you've got to do something creative is a serious problem. For one thing, I don't think starting with an essay is a good idea, and it's not an exaggeration to say that you could get a lot done by starting with a sentence and moving up to an outline gradually. It's not about educating someone into the next incarnation of a Nabokov or Hemingway, but rather about breaking down the process into comprehensible bits that become a part of a clearly understood toolkit, and work in tandem with reading skills to give the student a conceptual understanding of how writing can serve their goals in the subject at hand.
I don't think it's cynical to regard the majority of writing work that students do in the US as remedial-by-design and targeted at the wrong measure of its efficacy. YMMV.

It depends on what you're teaching. I'd be surprised to hear an intro-Expos class teaching people how to write an essay with an argument, cause by the time I get students they have no idea what I'm talking about when I say "research question" or "thesis" or "you cannot write a book report or just talk about something in general without citations."

I'm teaching writing in the social sciences, though, which absolutely requires that your essay has an argument. Something that, no matter how many times I say it, most students never seem to understand. Just tonight I got two more questions that boil down to "Can I just talk about something and not arrive at a conclusion?"

No.

I wish vocational rehab would let me take one class instead of two this coming spring. I think I could handle one, but two (full-time) would end with me withdrawing again and that would be very bad...

I hate that requirement. It's often unreasonable to expect a student to come to his conclusions when the issue isn't settled in the literature. Like, what if I do some research and I find out that there are big names™ saying different things on the topic, reaching incompatible conclusions, but each (or most) of them making reasonable arguments? Sure, I should be able to form a personal opinion, but in an academic setting I should also recognize that I'm a student who spent a few afternoons reading up on something I don't really understand in depth, while these authors spent years specializing and researching the subject professionally, were peer-reviewed, and so on.
So yeah, if it's required by the assignment I'll pick a side and do my best to argue for it, but I can't help thinking it's kinda stupid.

Well, generally you are allowed to walk a line between them. An argument doesn't require that you engage in dichotomous thinking. It just requires that you be thoughtful about it and go beyond a simple summary of the material.

What's the actual reason for that requirement? I get that you do need to demonstrate making an argument, but what's so fundamentally wrong with exploring ideas without having a formal thesis?

Because it requires very little thought. Summarizing material has its place, but the point of writing a paper is to think critically about the material and to set forth your thoughts in a persuasive manner.

Put another way, if all English majors did was write about what people with Ph.D.s thought about books, none of us would ever have gotten jobs.

It's perfectly possible to engage with material, think critically, etc without actually trying to argue a thesis.

While I'm at it: man is the line between summary and analysis super blurry. It seems to me it's almost one of those "you know it when you see it" things, weighted heavily on a per-instructor basis. I'm feeling cynical today (what can I say, I'm flighty) so I'm going to go with what LK said: it's just a crutch for instructors looking to fit essays to a rubric as efficiently as possible, vs. actually engaging with a student's writing and attempting to provide useful feedback.

The above comes with the caveat that I've only had a half cup of coffee and I'm feeling rather cranky at the moment. Probably I'll change my mind and be more charitable later in the evening after I've had a martini. :)

Probably part of the asshole factor that LK identified above is the reality of undergrad class size. My writing class started with like 40 students. It's down a bit since then to maybe twenty or so; but that's still a lot of students. My instructor is teaching two (or maybe three) sections of the class; at the end of the semester that puts the range of pages she'll have to read and grade somewhere around 320-600. She'll have about a week, maybe a week and a half to get that job done. That sucks. Frankly I doubt it's actually really possible to give that much student writing the attention it deserves. So yeah now I'm back to somewhat sympathizing with my instructor: rigid paragraph structure, MUST MAKE AN ARGUMENT and analysis vs. summary end up being shortcuts, but they're shortcuts of necessity. There's an asshole in this situation and it's not me or my instructor, it's the fact that the university has designed its writing program for undergraduates to basically be impossible. "You forgot to have a sentence linking quote one and quote two; -3 points" is stupid asinine feedback that doesn't say anything about actual writing vs. writing toward an arbitrary standard, but at least it's something you can reasonably accomplish when you're dedicating a grand total of five or ten minutes to each paper.

I'm training these students to actually be able to write academically in the social sciences and you can't do that (in most fields) by just writing what is basically a book report saying "Author A says this and Author B says this so we will never really understand the mystery of the insert-whatever-here." These students will go on to write a thesis to graduate based on their own original research and they need to be able to put an actual arguable thesis together--something a startling amount of students cannot do. And honestly in all the other classes I've graded for, the difference between a B paper and an A paper is usually that a B paper doesn't take a stand and an A paper does--with a great thesis and supporting evidence. A paper that can convince me of something is doing better than a paper that's just summarizing someone else's arguments to a point where I should just go read the original research and be done with it if the student paper isn't telling me anything new or giving me new insights into it.

It's something that's really hard for a lot of people to learn, but once you've got it you end up writing A papers everywhere!

That's fair Quackers and I should probably back up some and acknowledge that I do see the value in what your course is doing. I think one thing that frustrates me about the typical undergrad research paper is that it doesn't involve actual research. It's just a glorified book report, but it feels like we (meaning, myself and other students) just jump through a bunch of hoops so our summaries aren't really summaries or are less obviously summaries.

OK like take e.g., economics. Say I'm going to write a paper about income inequality (which I am). One way I could go about it is to maybe come up with a hypothesis, or a theoretical model, then gather lots of data and plug it into STATA and use it to construct all sorts of juicy econometric models and etc etc and at the end of the day I'll write a conclusion about my hypothesis. That's research. Or, I can go to one of the various academic databases and search for papers on income inequality and review them and present them in a way that shows them supporting my thesis only I'm definitely not going to summarize them, I'm going to analyze them in such a way that proves my thesis. Here is the thing: summarize vs. analyze is this ridiculously hazy area and it seems what I've really done here is a book report, only I'm not really being honest because I'm cherry-picking the papers I found on EconLit that support my thesis. So somehow instead of being a book report it's now a research paper.

The hilarious thing is that if I did the former I'd almost certainly have a much stronger paper than if I did the latter. I'd also fail my class!

Perhaps, but which of the following tells you more about a student's ability to think critically and to turn those thoughts into effective writing:

a) a paper that discusses scholarly thought about a given topic and analyzes that scholarly thought; or
b) a paper that discusses scholarly thought about a given topic, analyzes that scholarly thought, and takes a position on the subject informed by, and possibly in opposition to, that scholarly thought.

It's certainly possible that critical thinking will be necessary in the non-thesis paper, but it's also clear that there is more required in the thesis paper (which will include all of the critical thinking that would have gone into the non-thesis version anyway). It's also certain that a non-thesis paper would be terminally boring for a professor, where the thesis paper has a shot at being at least amusing. Example: when I was 20, I wrote a paper about a couple of poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. For a professor who did his Ph.D. on William Blake before I was even born, and who continues to study Blake to this day. I could not prepare a summary of scholarly work on Blake that would tell him anything he did not already know. However, because the paper contained my own position on various elements of those poems, he would be able to evaluate what I got out of that scholarly work, and indeed out of the class itself.

I should be clear that I wasn't saying that asking students to have a clear thesis or write an argument of some kind is a a problem. I was describing an overly prescriptive approach to ye olde five paragraph essay format or, in the worst case scenario, such a paper written in response to a leading question when they are used as substitutes for building the writing process analytically from the starting level of the students up. As you are aware, class size and radically uneven starting points often mean that you have to start with pretty basic things, but low to mid-level college classes tend to toss differentiation and scalable assignments out the window in favor of mandating remedial-caliber work for everyone.

sinfony: good point. I think the crux of my objection is less "thou must have a thesis" and more the summary vs. analysis distinction, which (as I've said) seems really vague in a porno esque "you know it when you see it," way.

Just for fun, here's a copy of my "research proposal" for the final paper, which proposal isn't so much a proposal as it is an introduction & random body paragraph (as per the instructions of our instructor). I'd be interested to see what kind of feedback someone like oh, say, Quackers can offer and compare & contrast with what I get from my instructor.

I would say it's less about the summary vs analysis than the nature of the sources. You can write a good paper that is useful to you and others about secondary sources if it's thesis-driven, even if your primary contribution is contextualizing them relative to one another. On the other hand, as you move into more advanced work you will be focusing your theses more on things you have to distill from primary sources while still referencing the existing body of scholarly work, and that's where you move into the realm of "real" research. Straightforward summary will have its place in all of those, more than likely, when you strive to convey what your sources accurately. Obviously every field has its own spectrum between primary and secondary sources, and sometimes that's more dependent on what kind of argument you are making.
But the actual process of crafting an argument in support of your thesis can be productive even with relatively constrained sources and topics for the purpose of making class output manageable, *if* the fundamentals have been built up to the necessary stage with the students.

Some of my least favorite academic papers in B-school were "literature summarizing the literature". When discussing these in class I'd always talk about how little value I got from them; they basically read like bibliographies in which each entry also has a three-sentence executive summary.

I can't tell you how someone in a subject other than history would look at it, so ymmv.

This is your thesis, yes? I'd say you need to look at it in its own right and take apart what it's actually saying and what it isn't. One, I encourage people to rethink "we". Sometimes it's unavoidable for the sake of elegance in some kinds of papers, but almost always it injects an editorial tone and assumptions about the reader that are off-putting and can lead to methodological problems (as I'll get to in a moment).
Second, that "we" is letting you get away with an important piece of sleight-of-hand. You have a much stronger argument if you propose specific actors and entities (especially for a short paper) rather than implying responsibility and agency is shared by a vague idea of society across the board.For one thing, given the size of the paper I doubt you are going to have the space or desire to break down how the elite-level discourse about each of the economic decisions you look at filters down to individual voters, consumers, and mass-media discussions about the economy, although I'm sure there are good papers there as well.
In that same spirit, you need to specify the broad strokes of the decisions and indicators for outcomes you are going to use to test your argument. You're probably going to want to consider what your measure is for high inequality vs low, and what time frame you are going to be using for your boundaries.
Finally, there's a philosophical question: are you interested in analyzing the direct cause and effect of decisions that, when looked at in the aggregate, lead to heightened levels of inequality? Are you interested in measuring the stated intentions of these decisions by those making them against the results? I guess I'm just not clear on these things from the proposal, and while I get a better idea when I look at the excerpt underneath I'm still not sure that you're using a strong enough thesis to keep your ideas targeted.

With respect to the excerpt which is pretty hard to assess at this point in its evolution: in my field, it's generally good advice to avoid block quotes unless the way it is said is as important as the content you could just paraphrase. If the language is important or useful for a particular phrase, then nested quotes will often do the trick, especially for secondary sources. I say that with a clear conscience while working on a paper filled with block quotes, because I don't think they are inherently bad so much as often misused.

That's off the top of my head, I hope it helps.

My aforementioned Blake professor had the best (and most terrifying) syllabi. You'd come in on the first day of class and he'd hand them around first thing. Never more than a page. In essence, they said: "We will be reading x, y, and z books. You will turn in two papers on date x and date y, of any length, on a topic of your choice. I am telling you the due dates now so there will be no extensions for any reason." That is how you do a prompt.

It's probably a good prompt, since you seem to have gotten something out of it. Left unsaid is whatever work he did in class to set standards for writing and thinking about the process itself, and what assumption he could make about what students brought with them when they first showed up. I had similar assignments in my 400 level English class which I thoroughly enjoyed along with the other seven people in the class, but I still got a lot out of my mandatory freshman writing seminar because the structured assignments were well-designed for the seemingly random assortment of skill levels in the students.

Yeah, the context of the class should inform the degree of structure in the assignments. This guy could get away with it because by the time you are choosing to take Blake or a class called "Tragedy and Philosophy" with a professor with a reputation for being difficult, you can probably handle your shit. The other good thing about vague prompts, though, is that it encourages students to interact with the professor and hash out their ideas in advance--which works better at smaller schools, but that is just another reason that smaller schools rule.

Thanks LK!

Context for that writing: dashed off in about 60 minutes this morning. Yes, I was slacking. Given the context for the class (which has, to this point, literally wasted something like 20+ hours of my time over the semester; not including time spent outside of class writing) I'm not about to offer a lot of buy-in unless there's a demonstration that there's going to be a concomitant level of effort put in by the new instructor. Also the fact is that I know my shit enough to dash off something that satisfies the requirements for the assignment (which was ungraded) in a minimal amount of time with virtually no effort. Also also the body paragraph about the Fed was mostly meant to display a level of technical proficiency that a) was 100% compliant with the paragraph format that's been opposed on us while b) leaving my instructor totally mystified as to what I'm talking about because I'm throwing jargon around left and right. In that sense it represents a bit of a written tantrum, for which I now feel a bit sorry over. But only a small bit.

Anyway, I do appreciate your feedback. The actual purpose of the assignment, as explained to me after class, is that we need to demonstrate the ability to link different sources (quotes) and then from those links derive new ideas of our own. It goes back to that rigid paragraph structure: intro, quote, summary, quote, link, next graf. Basic stuff I know. I'll be a good little student drone and do what's expected of me because that's how I get an A, but I don't have to be thrilled about it.

Your feedback on the thesis is good stuff; it's very much a passive-voice wishy washy load of crap. If I stick with income inequality I'll revise it quite a bit. I actually like the idea of writing about elite communication filtering down into the misconceptions of the public at large, but unfortunately I don't think that'll fly given the nature of the paper. It's less an actual research paper and more an extended exercise in connecting quotations.

Feedback I got from her:
- intro too long, and lacks citations. Sigh. The one place where I'm not bound by rigid format restrictions, and she wants me to adhere to a rigid format restriction. Also I was always under the impression that you didn't need a source for factual claims like, e.g., larry ellison bought a Hawaiian island. Also the whole thing is a summary and instead of summarizing I should have provided a quote. wtf?!? Also she wants me to write more formally. So much for encouraging students to develop a voice!
- Her feedback on the body paragraph was kind of incoherent. She wants me to "use quotes to support claims and ideas," which, uhh, I did. It's just that she didn't understand the claims and ideas I was making. Which is fine because they're kind of specific and a little technical and your average writing instructor with a background in poetry shouldn't be expected to get what I'm saying when I say that the Fed has "pursued a contractionary monetary stance." I pointed out that I could resolve her objection by providing more context, but the rigid paragraph structure doesn't allow for that. She replied with "use quotes," to which I pointed out that if I used more quotes to provide context I'm deviating from the purpose of linking quotes together. I wouldn't be using a quote to synthesize ideas, just to explain them. To which she said "use quotes to support claims and ideas" and at this point you can see that we're in a bit of a circular loop from which I quickly exited.

So basically: mission accomplished. I successfully subverted the assignment: my body paragraph was technically perfect (by the criteria she laid out) and also totally incomprehensible to her because it was technically perfect. Bit of a dick move on my part but hey, I gotta have some fun somehow. :)

I just got out of an exam (ugh) but I always tell my students re: citations--"did you do the research on that?" You never want to give the reader the impression that something is all you when it's not. They seem to understand it better when I explain that if you use something/someone as a reference, maybe the reader want to go look into that, either because they doubt your context or because they think its interesting--you always want to give them a way to check, so cite.

That may not be coherent as I type over my celebratory donut at dunkins. Fucking 21 page coding exam. No idea how I did, which I guess is better than last time where I knew I failed

P.s. I give my students ridiculous amounts of line by line feedback on what they did well and what could be improved so I will look at that when I get home!

Here's a fun fact: sometimes those well studied authors aren't sure of what they're writing about either. They just think they have a pretty good idea and here's some evidence and there you go. Which is why peer-review is sometimes so hilarious cause even though the author sounds like they are an absolute authority and what they say is above reproach, other scholars will not just disagree, but eviscerate them. I love peer reviewed articles just for that!

QUADRUPLE POST:

Apparently there's a HUGE thread on our class forum of people complaining about the exam. They told the people that took it later in the day that no one during the day finished. Except...that's not true, cause I did! But everyone is basically saying it was fucking crazy and that everyone, including people who have been programming for 10+ years, feel like this class is making them doubt their life choices.

So I feel a little better!

Edit: Or I did before they released the grades and I failed. However, I came within 10 points of the mean, which is pretty good, considering the std dev for this one was...20. Apparently most people only got about 1/4 of the points. Which is crazy. We apparently had 47 questions and only 75 minutes to do them. And by "do them" I mean write out actual lines of code on paper for something.

Worst. Class. Ever.

I have two essays due in the next couple of weeks. I hadn't started work on either of them until today as I absolutely despise writing papers. Managed to get in a whopping one thousand words today. I figure if I can replicate that success tomorrow I can spend next weekend doing the same for the second paper. *sigh*

I'll go ahead and stick my nose in. It's Baldr's fault for pointing me to this thread. The first thing I would say is that you need to decide who you are writing this for. If you are writing this for yourself, my follow-up question then is "Why take the class?" If you are writing it for the class, then my follow up question is "Why not honestly follow the format and advice that your instructor offers/requires?" It seems you have confidence in yourself as a writer. Why do you bristle at "going through the motions"? Challenge yourself to write a paper that is to her level, and follows her requirements, but is still a good work. If you can't do that, then -- well, why are you a confident writer again?

It sounds like the model she's using is a simple CEW model similar to the kind I teach to my high schoolers (Claim, Evidence, Warrant). The fact that her advice about how to use CEW is to use CEW is a bit silly.


Things you need to (can) cite in your intro: "people who seem to know about such things" - Which people? Where? In fact, just cite where you got all that Lanai info; otherwise the reader gets to assume you live there, or something. Your second paragraph has citations, and so is fine. Your intro doesn't read too long even though it's over a page (what is that, size 16 font? Jeebus) but probably could be tightened a little and thus be more effective (the list of island owners, for example, is showing off. You used four/five lines of text on something that only develops your voice. Write tighter.).

Your claim in the body paragraph is "Even nominally independent institutions aren’t immune to the social and political pressures that have led to the current level of income inequality." Saying that something "isn't immune" is wishy-washy language at best. Tell us how you really feel. I know you get there, but I want to know now!

Agree with LK on use of block quotes. The basic idea is that, as a reader, if I wanted to read that paragraph from Oivier, et al, I would read their paper instead. I'm reading your paper, and I want as many of your words as possible (at the same time, cite your sources! I know, but somehow this cognitive dissonance is resolvable).

That's about it. My remaining advice would be lectures about writing to your audience, not above it, but I can bite my tongue. I was young once, too.

Thanks Matthew! I'm actually not all that young (33). I get the need to write to my audience, which in this case is my instructor.

Re the lbock quotes: The assignment explicitly requires quotes; paraphrasing is not an option. Hence their presence!

If I said I was being faceiteous, would you believe me? ;-)

To be snarky, quotes and block quotes are not the same thing. Only use what is actually important to your analysis.

Ancient advice from my time at college, though as it was tutorial system, probably not much validity to US students - heck, after my first year almost all of my economics tutorials were 1:1

- Sod textbooks. I think I bought about 3-4 really good ones after I had used them in the libraries. Otherwise, that is what the library is for
- Try to do everything from first principles. I did engineering & economics, and would use economics text book to get the citations, then go find the original papers. Reading Axelrods' "The Market For Lemons" >> someone else's summary of it. Same with engineering, though there it was more a case of trying to really understand the underlying maths, and how it was being used to model problems to be solved.
- Game exams. At Oxford, all previous papers were available. Say the paper required 5 problems to be solved out of 10 questions - I would only bother to really revise 7 out of 10 topics, sometimes just 6. You even save time because ther are 3-4 questions you don't even have to consider answering... To get an even better edge, find out who is setting the papers that year for which subjects. Professors/ lecturers have their styles/ prejudices, i.e. are they more interested in theory, or the application of theory.
- Go to interesting lectures by quality teachers, even if they aren't relevant to your course.

jeffd - definitely do maths as a major with economics. I was one of the few doing engineering with economics, and it sometime felt like an unfair advantage when it came to econometrics, that my maths brain was much better trained than most other economics students.

A lot of this has to do with Bloom's Taxonomy, and how it sets up expectations of student work. There's a lot of academic gobbledygook about how best to label the different levels and which shape best represents an arbitrary system of classification, but what it boils down to is that summarizing is considered "less challenging" than analysis.

The main difference between summarizing and analysis in this system is that summary is "X says Y" while analysis is "X says Y, and it means Z." If someone says your analysis is actually just a summary, what they are saying is that they don't understand what you are adding to the discussion, and think you are just passing ideas along.

Had a linear algebra exam this morning, aced it. As usual with math, I spent too much time studying and as a result the actual test was quite easy.

After agonizing all weekend about having to write 2000 words for an essay that was assigned week one and due this week, I ended up writing about 1000 words in an hour or so for my regular homework assignment about using game theory to analyze management/investor conflict with regards to positive accounting theory, with a dash of efficient market hypothesis thrown in for good measure. Fun stuff!

Argh, this fucking paper is just killing me. I find it impossible to provide meaningful analysis given the "quote sandwich" restriction that's been imposed. I emailed my professor to get some help, and her reply was borderline useless:

No, it doesn't help! My problem isn't finding sources. My sources cup overfloweth. My problem is actually taking these sources and doing what you want me to do with them! I keep falling into this crappy pattern where I just offer up a paragraph that looks like "This guy says ______ but he's wrong and here's why because this other guy says _______," which I think is pretty weak and not likely to make for a very good paper. When I pointed that out, her only reply was "I want you to analyze and provide original ideas." I almost feel like the advice I'm getting from her is just pre-generated stock replies; I haven't felt like she's making any effort to specifically engage with me (or the rest of the class), she's just offering up some pablum.

I suspect at least part of the problem is that this course - like many others - was intended to build on itself, and the totally useless instructor we had deprived us of almost all of the foundational work that I'd be basing this paper off of. It's extremely frustrating to me; I'm not used to having problems with writing, and I seriously have no idea what to do about it.