CALLING BULLSHIT

In 2013, writer and professor Rebecca Shulman captured the essence of essay writing throughout higher ed:

"Everybody in college hates papers. Students hate writing them so much that they buy, borrow, or steal them instead. Plagiarism is now so commonplace that if we flunked every kid who did it, we’d have a worse attrition rate than a MOOC. And on those rare occasions undergrads do deign to compose their own essays, said exegetic masterpieces usually take them all of half an hour at 4 a.m. to write, and consist accordingly of “arguments” that are at best tangentially related to the coursework, font-manipulated to meet the minimum required page-count."

Does this sound familiar? You -- a COD student enrolled in English 1101 -- have been writing essays since grade school. You learned about the 5-paragraph format, transition sentences, argument & thesis statements, citations & MLA formatting; perhaps you've recently written college application essays; you've probably written essays (in school) covering your career ambitions, your summer vacation, literary texts, favorite foods, your ancestry, etc. etc. etc. And here you are -- enrolled in yet another English class -- likely with the expectation that you'll have to write bullshit your way through more of these essays.

Perhaps you've pulled an all-nighter, inevitably writing bullshitting your way through one of these assignments just to meet your teacher's deadline. Or length requirement. Maybe you've purchased a paper online because you just didn't want to write one yourself. Maybe you've even consulted blog posts like this one -- "How to Bullshit an Essay-The Ultimate Guide" -- which offers tips on how to fake your way through a paper (and if the tips just aren't good enough, the same site allows you to buy a custom essay for the low price of $12.99/page).

How many of you can truly, honestly say that you've never, ever, bullshitted your way through one of these assignments? Why is this??

Your task for this assignment is to compose a Personal Essay which contemplates this habitual practice of bullshiting your way through an essay assignment.

Questions to think about or address might include:

• Have you bullshitted on an essay assignment? Why?

• What are your academic & professional goals? i.e., what do you want to be when you grow up? And what might school-based essays have to do with this?

• How do you define writing? How do you define GOOD writing? And how might the essay improve -- or stifle -- that?

In sum, I want your unfiltered thoughts on the genre of the academic essay. Don't lie your way through this. Write with clarity and honestly. Think of it as an opportunity to reflect upon your experience writing in classroom settings, and what good (or not) has come from it. In sum, the PURPOSE of this writing assignment is for me to get to know you & your academic background a little, and for you to convey some of your current composition skills.

The FORMAT for this assignment should adhere to the typical standards of a college essay: written in 12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced, with 1-inch margins on all sides.

Write the best draft you can for next Tuesday's class (preferably in Google Docs), and bring a digital copy to class next week.