22 May 2007

My Head Hurts

This is an actual sentence from a term paper I am currently grading, verbatim:
In the book "Monster: A autobiography of a L.A. Gang Member" written by Sanyika Shakur, which was his name after he converted to the Islamic religion, but was known as Kody "Monster" Scott of the Eight Tray Crips of South Central, you are abruptly thrown in the front line with one of Los Angeles most prominent gang member Kody "The Monster" Scott as he remembers life experiences, drawn from his sixteen years of gang involvement starting in the sixth grade when he was intitiated into the Crips gang, while he is in solitary confinement.

I gues I could call this the James Joyce/William Faulkner School of Term Paper writing. But I was subjected to both "Portrait of the Artist" and "The Bear" as a high school senior, and the experience scarred me for life. Plus, both Joyce and Faulkner could properly punctuate, when they so chose. What's sad is that the sentence above was written by someone who will be a college graduate next week (and who, I am sure, has never read either Joyce or Faulkner, and thus could not claim his inspiration there).

2 comments:

Crowzma said...

I'm so confused ...

Knatolee said...

My oh my. We really are raising a generation of illiterates.

It sounds like he cobbled that sentence (paragraph? monstrosity??) together from three or four different sources. A comma splice here, a run-on sentence there, voila! Give me an A+, teacher.

Lordy.