Loyal readers may have noted that I did not post any exemplary student writing this term. In my defense, my students this Winter have been wonderful. I have had hardly any nightmares in which I lost control of the class because the mofos just wouldn’t listen.
They’ve contributed healthily to discussions and have been consistently clever for ten whole weeks in a row! Just as I was bragging about them to a friend in my office, one of my less stellar pupils deposited the following stinkbag into my unsuspecting paws:
When Doyle created Sherlock Holmes towards the end of the 1880’s England was still very proper. The British reader may have had different criteria for describing a good detective then the American reader of 1930-40’s. The need for obvious violence may not have been as necessary as for their American counterparts. The world was a different place in 1930’s American than it was in the late 1880’s in Britain. Politics, religion, and society all played a part in the influence of each author and therefore, the character of the detectives they developed.
I don’t know where to begin anymore. In all fairness, other pitiable lummoxes contributed equally woeful submissions for their final essays. In honor of the course’s subject matter, I will be nominating passages for the No Shit, Sherlock awards as I finish reading all the papers. More to come.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen “lummox” in print. It’s an odd looking word, don’t you think, Vee?
If it’s not too much of an ask; do you think you could explain precisely what’s wrong with the passage. Me being a “pitiable” engineer, I’d be interested in what’s what word-wise.
Well, the problems here are more content- than grammar-based. As far as the words go, she uses “then” where she needs “than” and “American” when she means “America,” and she has a couple of comma problems.
The really irksome bit it just that it’s all so dull and pointless. What, I think, she means to say is that the two works she’s comparing are different because they each are influenced by the different cultural value systems whence they emerge. [Or "from which they emerge," if you find "whence" too archaic.]
Why not just say so? That’s only one sentence, and it avoids making dubious claims like that “England was [...] very proper” or that violence was “necessary [...] for their American counterparts.”
And whenever I see someone cobble together a list of influences that includes “politics, religion, and society,” I feel the bile begin to rise.
“Society.” Dude. Be. More. Specific.
So that’s my beef with this passage. I admit it’s not as funny as some of the lummox writing I have posted in the past, but this is a clever class. So I guess I oughtn’t complain.