High Praise from a Harsh Critic

I'm fairly obsessive about writing well thought out and well-written essays. This last semester has been particularly hard for me for two reasons.

A: My Shakespeare professor really values proper writing skills and beautifully written papers. One of his main goals is to improve students' writing while they are in his class. And friends, he is not afraid to give feed back and criticisms. (Plus he's British so sometimes his biting comments really sting.)

B: Each paper we've written has had to have two drafts. Both of which we email to him and he emails back marked up with his comments and revisions. This hurt my pride. So much so that after the first paper I would begin to hyperventilate anytime I saw that he had emailed a paper back to me. Waiting for Word to load so that I could scroll down to the bottom and read his comments before scrolling through the paper and looking at all of the inserted comments was pure hell, I tell you. My roommate will attest to this.

So this afternoon after church I checked my email and saw that my final paper (which was only a one draft paper) was sitting in my inbox. I was nearly sick. I have wanted to vomit every time I've seen his email with my paper attached, but this time I was really worried. So I started freaking out, roommate started laughing, and I waited while Word opened.

Friends, today is a glorious day! My adrenaline actually started rushing when I read his comments. I may even copy and paste my whole paper because I am that overjoyed. These were his final remarks about my paper:


Emily: a dynamite paper in terms of subject matter, use of sources, and clarity of style: journalistic in absolutely the best sense of the term. I could have perhaps done with – and would have enjoyed reading – some kind of response to the jingoistic use of Shakespeare from his own words that so often work against rabid nationalism, but this does not take away from your achievement of producing a fine and finely nuanced piece of work. Well done indeed: A.


Holla! I will live off this little bit of praise for the next several days while I figure out what jingoistic means.