Conjunction-itis

Wife rebukes are the worst. I know I can't hide, because she sees everything. I know she's right, because she knows me. And yet rather than responding with the appropriate shame and humility, I arch my back in defiance. If she really understood the situation, she would see I was right.

But here I am, a couple of weeks down the track again and I can see she was spot on. This was the comment:

I don't think you're being very godly in the way you respond to assessment feedback at college.

Grr. It's frustrating that Sarah sees through my feigned humility on getting a good mark. It's infuriating the way Sarah looks straight past my polite questioning of a poor result as I pour scorn on the markers credibility, and she sees my hurt pride. And yet there I am again, grumbling about this, that or the other, living and dying by the distinction or lack thereof.

A few months ago, I finished my Old Testament essay and needed to cut about 300 words to get back to the word limit (including the +10%). To achieve this I just started at the beginning trying to delete as many individual words as possible. When that wasn't enough I went and deleted paragraphs. Then I went back to try and delete entire sentences. Another word count had me back looking for individual words again.

Basically, in desperation, I deleted the majority of my conjunctions. In hindsight, an essay without conjunctions would in fact come across as a series of moderately related ideas. I should have known the marker would notice their absence.

General Comments: 

Thanks for your essay. You have clearly worked hard at grappling with some of the major issues that the topic raises, particularly in terms of an Evangelical approach to the creation accounts. You also made some astute observations in terms of the assumptions that many scholars bring to the text of Genesis, and did a good job of critiquing them. These are important analytical and critical skills to develop, so well done!

Suggestions for improvement:

In terms of suggestions for improvement, I have a few. First, at points your writing style became a little stilted, particularly near the beginning of the essay. There were several sentences and paragraphs which came across as discrete, unconnected units of thought. In written communication, it’s important to provide the reader with verbal cues to help follow the flow of thought, by use of conjunctions and conceptual links between sentences.  Otherwise, it makes it hard to really ‘get’ what you are communicating. 

Amen to that brother. The reason there was no conjunctions was that I deleted them all. I assumed, in my ignorance that simply putting the ideas in close enough proximity to each other you would see their obvious connection. The relationship of concepts was expressed spatially rather than verbally.

Anyways, I was grumbling again about how the marker should have seen past the difficulty of expression and instead engaged more with the concepts I raised, when Sarah thought it was time for a word from the wise: stop being a cry baby and be a little gracious.

Wife rebukes are the worst.