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Professor's red pen saved my entire grade last semester
I turned in my first big history paper last October, felt pretty good about it. Professor handed it back with notes everywhere, but one line stuck with me: 'You're summarizing, not analyzing.' That hit different. So I went back to my thesis, found my main argument was buried under all the facts I just repeated from the textbook. Once I stripped that out and actually argued my own take, my next paper jumped from a C to an A-. Has anyone else had a teacher call them out on something simple that changed how they write?
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jesse844h ago
Got called out my sophomore year for "writing like a thesaurus threw up on the page." My TA circled like half my vocabulary and wrote "stop trying to sound smart" in the margin. Hurt my feelings at first, but she was right. I was just swapping basic words for fancy ones I barely understood. Once I started writing like myself instead of trying to impress, my arguments actually made sense. Whole class went better after that.
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