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If the title of this post sounds obvious, welcome to my world. I can't tell you how many students open their essays with painfully mundane statements of the blatantly obvious, many of which boil down to: "Writers write!" Often this takes the form of a sentence like, "Authors use imagery in their stories." Others congratulate the author in a manner similar to this: "Without the minor characters the many intricacies that make Shakespeare so widely popular would be lost." Well, it's a good thing he thought to include those characters then! Now to the quotes. As always, these sentences are taken from student work, and my comments are in ( ).

- He could be mental challenged.

- Peyton Farquar allows his psychological plane to take over. (Never let your psychological plane have the upper hand!)

- Him miss one and fell through the ice.

- Words in short stories are significant. (Almost as significant as the pretty pictures.)

- Lady Macbeth shows that guilt is not a priority of hers yet. (Guilt is always my priority; that and self-loathing.)

- The reactions and actions from Macbeth are different from one another.

- Macbeth is a sole character that violence is involved in.

- Lady Macbeth does a speech about violence. (Hmmm....)

- Macbeth will not be able to be king without being able to not worry about people finding out that he killed Duncan.

- In Macbeth Shakespeare makes a valiant effort to create a theme. (Unfortunately, he fell short.)

- Macbeth will not be able to sleep no more because of the tremendous guilt that invaded his body. (That's a bad infection.)

There is a line in Macbeth in which Macbeth is told that he cannot be killed by a "man born of woman." The following two quotes come from that line. The first demonstrates a frequent error of my students (not knowing the difference between "woman" and "women").

- Macbeth thinks that Macduff was born of women. (And then stitched together by Dr. Frankenstein?)

- Macbeth would not be harmed by anyone born a woman. (So he should only fear the transgendered, I suppose.)

Back to class.

Jeremiah