How to Write Goodly

After I had stuffed the clothing into the washing machine, I started pawing through some college notebooks of my brother that were lying on a table nearby. They were dated around January 1980 which was his third year at Providence College. That feels about a hundred years ago. It's so long ago that no one remembers when Aquinas Hall burned up killing all those girls there at PC. Even some firemen I know had to be reminded of it.

In the notebook, there were a couple of term papers shoved in. I read one, about 15 pages long which was titled, “The Use of Appearance/Reality in Opehlia's Funeral Rites in Shakespeare's Hamlet.” It sounded like a Ph.D thesis to me. How narrow can you get? Apparently very much so. The actual passages of Ophelia's funeral in Hamlet might be a page at most and here he is building a larger idea from a few scant lines. He completely blew off the speech about Yorick's skull the grave digger managed to fish out of the ground. I found the actual passage his entire paper was based on.

The queen, the courtiers. Who is this they follow?

And with such maimed rites? This doth betoken

The corse they follow did with desperate hand

Fordo its own life: 'twas of some estate.

Couch we awhile, and mark.

That's it. And in truth, the entire paper was based on two words really, “maimed rites.”

I guess that's what you do in college course called, “Shakespeare's Tragedies After 1500.”

I read the paper and was shamed by my own atrocious writing. He was always better at it than I and the blog you read here generally is a one and one/half first draft. If I wanted to, I could gussy up the writing a bit but I'm too lazy to do that. He on the other hand would write a first draft that would probably equate to third one of mine.

Ken had a gift and he followed it. Well, to a point. That natural gift I read in the paper was crucified by the Dominican professor who graded it. All along the margins, there was that red ink criticizing either his grammar or the run of his argument. There were suggestions I couldn't understand. Well, I wouldn't. I'm not an English major. Add to that my writing was never polished by cutting criticism either so of course I never learned to write proficiently. But talk about nitpicking. One suggestion/criticism was, “Your use of the comma in this sentence forces the reader to to focus on a distraction rather than your main thrust, which is the travesty of Ophelia's funeral. ”

A god damn comma.

Still, I was pretty impressed at how my brother, at a kid's age of 21, could write so well and on something so damned narrow.

**

I had one of my papers called out by a Rhode Island College art professor once and for good reason. I was drunk when I wrote it.

RIC back then forced you to take a “365 course” which was not in your major. It was required to help “round out” your liberal arts degree. So I took this idiot course in Art, a sort of introduction to American Contemporary Art. The stuff like Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and the such. It was a silly easy course which guaranteed me an A. I could breeze through it while I spent the majority of my time on the real degree I was after. Why waste time otherwise?

I blew the paper off to the last minute. The day before it was due, this guy MK and I had purchased a couple of six packs and sat outside the Student Union while some band was playing. It was a late spring day and it was made for putting a buzz on and leer at the girls that came by. I put on my springtime buzz and then M and I separated to get on with our day. I was responsible. I went to write that paper at Adams's Library computer terminals, smelling of beer.

I whacked it out. I was just a review of Vincent van Gogh life and my reaction to his artwork. I handed it in on time.

A week later I get a letter asking me to see this art professor. I almost didn't care as this course I treated with all the respect you'd treat “Introduction to Finger Painting.” But he wanted to talk to me about something.

The professor tells me his thoughts when I met up with him.

“I called you in about your paper. I had to fail it as it was atrocious. But I wondered...I knew you were a fourth year psych major and you had to have written many other papers and succeeded to make it to your final year, why this trash?”

“Take this line, 'van Gogh wore very, very baggy and poofy pants that made his neighbors point at him'”

“Or this one, 'van Gogh liked the color blue and he smeared it everywhere on the canvas and it dripped off.”

He asks why I did such a lousy job. I didn't say, “Well Mr. Professor, I whacked it out less than 20 hours ago while I was gooned on beer.” I probably made up some excuse that seemed to give me an excuse why I did such a shitty job. Work, school, work...god knows what I said.

The professor then tells me he knows I can write a better paper and allows me to do a re-write. I thank him and on the way to my car I can't help but think, “Shit, I have to do actual work for this class? I have to put in something of an effort to write this? I don't give a shit about contemporary art! Ah...damn these 365 courses...”

Had I been in PC's Shakespeare class (which is a lark because no way in hell would I have the prerequisites) but just say I was...my papers would piss off the professor so much that he'd grade it with a machete. He'd probably grade this blog with a machete too.