If a student handed in the following essay to you, what would you think?
Cervantes is a Spanish writer of the late XVIth – early XVIIth centuries. Wikipedia defines a writer as a person who produces literature or nonfiction, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, essays, articles, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images. Cervantes was very good at portraying ideas and images. An idea is a concept or mental impression. And an image is an artifact that depicts or records visual perception, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject–usually a physical object or a person, thus providing a depiction of it. Cervantes did not paint pictures but he wrote beautiful texts. A text is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. Cervantes transmitted many important messages in his art.
This is, obviously, not the text of the essay, but it’s exactly what the essay is like.
N. is convinced that the student is being facetious and I should be appreciative of the student’s great sense of irony. I suspect the student is condescending to me because I’m an immigrant who speaks English with an accent. I have to grade eight pages of the text where every other sentence is a dictionary definition. And I’m getting progressively annoyed with every sentence. How would you feel if you were a literary critic and a student started offering you Wikipedia definitions of the words “writer” and “text”?
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