"Favorite" student sentences

[mamselle]

A review of "The Seven Deadly Sins"?

Or plagiarized from Swift?

M.

[0susanna]

"These evil desires are birthed into society through sin and christened with putrid breath by ancient sages still barely old enough to comprehend them, but too beaten to conquer the miasma created by these monsters. What names these cantankerous mind-germs are ascribed varies from culture to culture, but, as language is the favorite hilt of morality's sometimes tempered blade, these names bear chief importance in the war against sin."

I feel like someone would rather be writing a fantasy novel than the literary analysis paper I assigned, but OK...

Does the entire paper read like this? I'd wonder if student has run a quote through one of those online paraphrasing systems, though it does read too coherently, if exaggeratedly high in style, to be generated by a machine. But what are "ancient sages still barely old enough to comprehend them, but too beaten to conquer the miasma"?

[present_mirth]

A review of "The Seven Deadly Sins"?

Or plagiarized from Swift?

M.

Got it in one, pretty much! The paper is about Dr. Faustus, specifically the Seven Deadly Sins pageant-within-a-play. Fortunately, the rest of it is not nearly as overwritten, and is really pretty decent on the whole; I am also confident it's the student's own work, he just couldn't resist the temptation to try to make his introduction all fancy.

[apl68]

Students do sometimes like to show off their Sunday-go-to-meeting fancy vocabulary.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  I've never forgotten the start I got when an undergrad student used "crapulent," more or less correctly, in an exam essay.

[writingprof]

Not a sentence, but the title of a submitted Word doc:

TheyWereRacist.docx.

What this student lacks in subtlety, hu gains in alignment with the Zeitgeist.

[marshwiggle]

Not a sentence, but the title of a submitted Word doc:

TheyWereRacist.docx.

What this student lacks in subtlety, hu gains in alignment with the Zeitgeist.

Saves time for the person grading; if the grader is an "activist", then they can just assign the A+ and move on without opening it.

[Chemystery]

"The hexane was hated until the temperature stopped increasing."

[Aster]

"Due to deeply embedded fish line broken humorous, need surgery septic infection."

I marked off so many points on the student's paper just for this sentence.

[apl68]

"Due to deeply embedded fish line broken humorous, need surgery septic infection."

I marked off so many points on the student's paper just for this sentence.

I'm curious as to the context of this sentence.  Nursing class?  Creative writing?  Excuse for absence?

[Bede the Vulnerable]

"The Russian government was then seeking to build the Trans-Atlantic Railway through Persia."

(No wonder the tsars didn't make it.)

[downer]

"Due to deeply embedded fish line broken humorous, need surgery septic infection."

I marked off so many points on the student's paper just for this sentence.

I strongly suspect the use of a paraphrasing website here.

[AmLitHist]

From a student self-assessment this week:

I came to class every day and completed all the work, even if I didn't understand it.

That last part goes a long way in explaining her final grade.

[Myword]

My students confused "surely" with surly.
And causal with casual,    every time.  Nature is very casual. God has casual powers.

Nature of reality meant the reality of nature. Consciousness was conscience.

[present_mirth]

From a response to cantos 3-5 of The Rape of the Lock:

"This was like reading an espionage scene and the Yu Gi Oh manga fused together."

I don't really know what this means, but it's awesome, regardless.

[Bede the Vulnerable]

"We are used to being taught in school about major American wars, like the Crusades and the War of 1812."

Yep.  I will need more coffee before I can write a comment on that paper.