And no one has ever misunderstood a teacher's point.
By analogy, I once counted 188 uses of "this" in two-page essays from twenty 101 students. I asked them to bring their favorite books to the next session. We opened them at random and counted a total of three "this" uses on the forty open pages, then discussed alternatives to overly heavy uses of "this" and its companion "these."
The lesson did no good, and the following week's two-pager had 201 "this."
So for the next essay, I made a one-time class rule that after three uses of "this" per essay, each subsequent "this" would reduce five points from the grade. The coercion sort of worked, as the next crop of two-pagers only contained a 50 count, but for years I had the campus reputation of the crazy prof who hated the t-word with such a burning passion that it got an automatic F on any paper where I found it.
This is a true story about this recall of what this or that teacher did.
By analogy, I once counted 188 uses of "this" in two-page essays from twenty 101 students. I asked them to bring their favorite books to the next session. We opened them at random and counted a total of three "this" uses on the forty open pages, then discussed alternatives to overly heavy uses of "this" and its companion "these."
The lesson did no good, and the following week's two-pager had 201 "this."
So for the next essay, I made a one-time class rule that after three uses of "this" per essay, each subsequent "this" would reduce five points from the grade. The coercion sort of worked, as the next crop of two-pagers only contained a 50 count, but for years I had the campus reputation of the crazy prof who hated the t-word with such a burning passion that it got an automatic F on any paper where I found it.
This is a true story about this recall of what this or that teacher did.
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