Afraid of Concepts

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Becoming Racist

Finally, a new post after so long! This favorite has many signs of a terrible essay. First and foremost, it has a complete lack of organization. He jumps from idea to idea and expects us to know what he's talking about. Also, there is the inexplicable header "Any Punctuation in Any Sentence". It's just baffling.

Favorite line: "They grew up on racist"

Old Man and the Sea Symbolism Picture

Not a lot to say here. I'll let this one fall down on its own. Although I must give the author props for his beauteous picture, there are at least twenty things wrong with this analysis.

Contents of a Young Man's Pocket

Although I frequently read essays from my essay collection, I occasionally find ones that I don't even remember adding. This essay is one of those gems. Starting out, it seems to be just an essay about the short story, "Contents of a Dead Man's Pocket," with a really bad introduction. However, once the author tells us of the contents of said pocket, it is clear (at least to those who have read the short story) that it is not. The essay is actually about a man named James, who from what I can tell is a Mary Sue of the author. Perhaps an astute reader could guess that James was a "memory type man" from the contents of his pockets: a camera, a pencil and eraser case, and an ipod, but not me. He carried the camera because his personal motto was "No proof no truth", and I can only assume that he pronounces it "troof".

Then, around the second page, there is a massive shift from third person to first person, where we learn that James was the author all along (!). Honestly, I was completely surprised by this revelation, considering that I really had no god-damn idea what the hell this essay was even talking about until the end.

Long story short, this is a great essay. Next time I pull out my binders for a little bit of story-time, this essay is going to be read aloud. I hope that everybody enjoys this as much as I did.

Side-note: I'm using my parents' printer, so the scans look a little different. I don't know how to stop it from scanning the whole screen, even if there's not paper there. I suppose I could spend time and photoshop that part out, but most everybody that knows me knows I am too lazy to do such a thing, so you're just going to have to deal with it.

Update soon. I promise.

If anybody checks for the update I promised, I'm sorry to say that I haven't gotten to it yet. I just had my last final earlier today and the rest of my day was filled with packing up my dorm-room. In the mean time, I recommend two other sources of bad writing to hold you together:

http://shitmystudentswrite.tumblr.com/
http://sichumor.tumblr.com/

I just found about the first blog earlier today, so I can't necessarily give it my wholehearted recommendation, though I have high hopes that older posts and future posts will live up to what I've read in the first few pages. However, I absolutely adore the [sic] humor lady and have been reading her posts for a few months. Support her! She needs it after spending all day reading shit people submit to her as a literary agent.

"Free Bird, Triumphal Nationalism" and "Romanticism"

Many times, when we searched for papers we would find many that were clearly for the same assignment. Or, as the author of "Romanticism" would say, being written for the same assignment is what makes this puts this into the category of being written for the same assignment. Sometimes, we would find two reasonable and articulate responses. Other times, we would find two equally awful responses and treasure them forever.

Since these two were short assignments, I will omit analysis and let them stand (fall) on their own. Before you read , you may want to listen to the triumphal nationalism of Lynrd Skynrd's "Free Bird" or the romanticism of Sean McGee's "My Story" to gain perspective:

"Free Bird" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np0solnL1XY
"My Story" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSxdogev7mA

The roaring 20's

If I posed the question of how best to describe the lifestyle of the 1920's, most people would respond with perhaps a mention of how an economic boom led to increasingly luxurious lives. However, they would be wrong and uneducated in their conclusions. This essay opened my eyes to the best way to describe it, calling it, "the roaring 20's, the Jazz age, known as an age of prosperity."

With this new-found prosperity, America could become a nation that was fertile ground for heroes--heroes who could hit sixty home-runs in a season. I never realized that three of the heroes that we associate with associate with the "roaring 20's, the Jazz age, known as an age of prosperity" (Babe Ruth, Charles Linbergh, and Henry Ford) were so similar. For example, I never knew that they were the first to do something/get 0ver sixty home-runs in a season/gain the respect of people by doing unheard of things.

I now present to the world another one of my favorite essays of all time, which is simply titled "Chapter 31 essay".