Rough draft angst (an ongoing saga)

I finished hacking my way through the rough draft underbrush. Some good stuff, some mediocre stuff, some "please go see a tutor NOW" stuff. (Too much of the latter.) And a plagiarist, who got a very stern warning. At the end, I was left with yet another crop of pet peeves:

• "In stanza X, it says/On page X, it says/In line 12, it says..." Aside from the unnecessary "it"--there's something else speaking on page X?--this is just a dreadful way to introduce a quotation. The tag doesn't provide a graceful (or logical) transition from the previous sentence; moreover, there's no context for the quotation itself.

  
  

• "Due to the fact that..." Is there something wrong with "because"?

  
  

• Random quotations. Student makes claim X, then cites passage Y, which has nothing whatsoever to do with claim X.

  
  

• "In the novel, X, by Y..." God created possessives for a reason. And surely the audience--namely, the instructor--knows that X is a novel (or poem, or what-have-you)?

  
  

Comments

[Jason]

The tic that has leapt out at me over the past 18 months or so is the insistent use of present progressive instead of the simple present. "Tennyson is saying . . . ." The 5 extra letters and the extra space are just *that* much closer to X number of pages.