Surrender of the Demoralized English Teacher: Twelve Ways to Make Essay Grading Easier

1. Let’s just go ahead and change the saying to “all intensive purposes.”
2. Give up on the rules of apostrophe usage. As a nation, we just can’t get this right. I don’t know why, but we can’t. Let’s just use context clues from now on. Or, “Lets just use context clue’s from now on.” Either way.
3. Commas, aargh. From now on we can just do the “put them where you hear a pause” thing. It’s fine.
4. There’s no reason to capitalize disease names, but if you want to you can. I’m sorry your grandma has Diabetes.
5. Strike the semicolon entirely. I love it, but at this point it would be less painful to lose it completely than to continue watching it get abused. I can’t take it anymore.
6. Drawing is now allowed in place of words. In some cases it might be preferable.
7. “Upmost” can be considered an acceptable variant of “utmost.” Students have a point on this one, actually — upmost makes more semantic sense.
8. MLA? What’s MLA?
9. Incorrect use of the reflexive pronoun “myself” can now be overlooked. This is the fault of corporate American cheesy business-speak. “When you’re done reading this list, please return it to Jim or myself.” It still hurt to type that, but okay.
10. Effect and affect are now interchangeable.
11. Ditto for to, two, and too.
12. “In today’s society,” “As humans,” “Nowadays,” and “From the beginning of time” really are all fantastic phrases that are applicable to almost everything. Let’s bring it all together now: “In todays society we are compromised, by a number of social ills such as Illiteracy and Inequity in public education. As humans, we want to fix this, however, its hard nowadays because we live in such a visual culture and theres no way to figure out how to write with the words. From the beginning of time communication, has been an upmost priority and, for all intensive purposes its really apart of larger problems that effect our society.”*

*This quote was taken from someone, somewhere. If you want more information please e-mail Jim or myself.