/lit/ - Literature

"Fuck off with your bullshit"

"That's the best essay I've ever read from a student."

I wrote a ripoff of Blood Meridian, set in modern London with Ernest Hemingway style prose. It's fucking easy to impress my former teachers.

"i can see why /lit/ didn't like it. it's got style."

This was an interesting paper. Again, I applaud your style. Personally, I enjoyed it. You have obvious talent, and I encourage you to continue to develop it.


I didn't feel like this paper had much of a structure. I know that you said it was an abstract of a personal journey, but it felt disjointed, more like a stream-of-consciousness piece than an essay. If there was an underlying structure, I didn't see it. I would be interested to see the outline, if you used one. Then, perhaps the organization would make more sense to me.


You wove a lot of ideas together in the paper. There is nothing wrong with that. Deftly weaving ideas together into a tapestry of ideas is one mark of writing mastery. That's because it is hard to do. Again, my personal opinion, but I would have liked more on how those ideas tied together. Or, you could have went another way and went into greater depth on fewer ideas. Space for this project was limited, and i suspect you may have tried to say too much with too little space.


As an MLA persuasive research paper, it wasn't that good. It wasn't persuasive and you didn't follow the MLA format. I gave it a C for the assignment. It was well-written in that the grammar and punctuation were very good, and it was interesting. It just didn't fit the assignment well.

...

>>5215659

If I were to rate it as just something to read, I would have given it a B. As I said, I enjoyed the paper and I like the style you used.


I won't be checking email on this account any longer as I am not sure when I will be teaching again, but if you would like to discuss this paper or some other that you are working on, please give me a call. I would enjoy it.

Me:
It was intermixing Buddhist philosophy, trolling, terrorism, bullying, but it was a paper on gun control with no clear answer on how to solve it whatsoever. Title was: Happiness Is A Warm Gun, and I couldn't tell if he decided to leave that semester because I tried to write in the tone of someone who would shoot the school up.

That's what I get for becoming so paranoid that I assumed my instructor was a gigantic troll, I guess.

>>5215623
>Style
>"muh bloody edgy blood sex was having edgy sex and lyf iz h4rd"

Why do you even exist

>>5212960

hey, OP, its you!

how is your futuristic euro/french muslim scifi book going?

>>5215682
wow good criticism i am learning a lot from this conversation.

I wrote an essay on the significance of the hybrid man-beasts that populated the first 13 cantos of Dante's Inferno. My professor was so impressed she distributed copies to the class saying they could use my essay as a reference in their own work. Which is as close as I've ever gotten to being legitimately published in an academic setting.

"Copied it and submitted it to a literary journal under my name, faggot."

That was the most uplifting feedback I ever got on /lit/.

The most enjoyable critical feedback I've ever gotten was when I was told that my essay on pre-cinematic technology was too historical and not analytical enough, but that I had a sophisticated reading of Heidegger.

>>5215723
>rêve
post more nudes of your hank hill ass, toots

>>5215737
>sophisticated reading of Heidegger.
I'm sure you did not.

>>5215588
Post, please

>>5215744
I'd rather not. It's quite embarrassing.

>>5215738
my ass is too big i can't fit it in the frame omg

>>5215743
Well it may have only been comparative to everyone else in the class, but that's what he said.

Heidegger's essay on technology is the only thing I've ever read by him, but it had a huge impact on my scholarship that year.

>>5215753
All the better.

>>5215764
"I'm so gonna steal that."

Love ya too, anon.

>>5215767
Didn't mean to post a reply there.

>>5215727
>encouraging students to use secondary sources

>>5215753
No, it is not, actually. The picture of you next to the bookcase: that image is extremely unbecoming, and if your ass is actually nice, like you're positing right now, then that image is doing you a major disservice.

>>5215774
i was hecka thin there. i gained weight so that my tits and ass would look nicer but i don't really care if someone on /lit/ thinks i have a flat ass.

Great feedback can be subtle. A few years back someone in a workshop castigated me (albeit politely) for writing something along the lines of, "John went to the window and looked out."

He told me -- 'if you write the guy walking up to the window, you don't need to say he looks out. That's sort of what someone does at a window. If he had jumped out of the window, that would be interesting. But this description just adds a few unnecessary words.'

It made me fundamentally reexamine how I describe things. So much of what amateur writers put down is redundant or otherwise needless information. It betrays a tone-deafness to the language, and a disrespect for your readers' intelligence. That one little criticism revolutionized the precision I take in my prose.

>>5212960
"I can see that if you started writing ten years ago instead of a year ago then you'd probably be worth something. But you're utter shit at the moment. Ten years from now, who knows. Although you will probably give up long before then."

I've been writing for 15 years....

Another one was back in third grade from an assistant teacher who was studying literature in college

"You got this from a book didn't you?"
"No"
"..you shouldn't plagiarize"
She gave me a D....
bitches be shoppin'

>>5212960
Does that mean that you only ever use "said"? I don't get the hate for other words honestly.

>>5215839
Oh and one one more.
This happened back in high school when I had made a questionable choice with my life.
A teacher I had the hots for wrote in my yearbook, "I was really hoping you would become a poet. There is always time. Love you."

I melted.

"I've read worse fan fiction"

>>5215692
It's going pretty well, tripnon. I jumped through my writer's block and finished Chapter 9.

>tfw 110k words and still nowhere near finished

>>5215845
I only ever use 'says', but it's more that even the protagonist, who thinks in long sentences and big words, speaks simply.

>>5217141
dude at some point you need to end it and just use your other ideas for book 2 :)

>>5217181
It's kind of hard, because there's little chance of any climactic, book-ending event really happening. The format's almost episodic.

I think the first book shall end at chapter 12 (probably at 150k words or something), just as it did in the first draft, but even so it's hard to think of a reason to.

The structure might as well be slice-of-life.

This, like all of your essays, is full of great ideas, it's just that you don't explore any of them thoroughly, nor do you synthesize them.