Why am I in this class?

You know, I can put up with all kinds of drains on my time. Even if there's some little nugget of information to be gleaned, I'll wade through the BS to get to it without complaint. But this Journal writing course astounds me for sheer, unapologetic WASTE.

First, I don't need a 2 hour lecture every week on how to write a term paper. I don't to be told what an effective topic sentence looks like. I don't need to look at dozens of excerpts of various student papers to rate their effectiveness. I don't need to be told what plagiarism looks like. My time would be much better spent just dedicating these 2 hours each week to extra research for my paper. What an unbelievable waste of time.

My favorite part of the course is getting grammar advice from someone who clearly knows nothing about grammar. Case in point:

Prof: What is wrong with this paragraph?
Class: Silence
Prof: It's all in past tense!

Well let's decide why no one responded.

First I think we can all clearly see that "is" standing on its own is not past tense. It's pretty clearly present tense.

Second, if he meant passive voice (likely) it's not passive voice either. A form of the verb "to be" and the preposition "by" appears, but that doesn't necessarily make a passive voice sentence. We would still need a past participle which is conspicuously absent. The sentence is in the indicative mood.

So apparently a paragraph is bad for being in the present tense and indicative mood...not because it simply isn't concise.

I'm sure that irritates me only because I spent 5 years as a working editor, but, honestly, what am I gaining by being here? I cannot find one legitimate benefit to spending my Wednesday nights in this course.

Thus, in order to hate the universe less, I have decided to spend my Wed. nights updating this sorely ignored blog. One friend in particular will be very pleased, assuming she ever checks this anymore.

...You may show your pleasure.