And in particular, a note to graduate students in the history department at U.C. Berkeley.

Grading a paper because it is not written in a style that you enjoy reading in your spare time is not, repeat NOT, a legitimate grading method.

Constructive comments include things like “Your link here to the text is a bit weak” or “You might want to develop on this idea more.”

Ignorant, waste-of-ink comments include things like “this language is a little bureaucratic,” “wordy phrase,” and my particular favorite “this is a super-long sentence.”

It is actually unhelpful to grade a student’s paper by making wholly incorrect statements such as that you do not have to indent on the right as well as the left when making a block quote.

Finally, good argumentative writing builds upon the points made before it, and so words like “thus” help lead the reader (unless she doesn’t understand argumentative writing) and you should not suggest that the writer take them out; words and phrases like “in addition” detract significantly from a paper by making it seem as if the point that follows is tangential and in addition to the actual argument.

This is college. I’m not a history major, and you know for a fact that I passed high school with some degree of writing competency. You also know for a fact because we’ve discussed it several times that I am a Rhetoric major and understand how to make an argument. If I’m using bureaucratic language, it’s intentional. If I make a sentence long, it’s because I had a lot to say about an idea that was relevant, and I assumed that someone who had a college degree (in the humanities, no less) could follow an idea for more than eight words; apparently I was wrong. This is not a writing class, you are not a writing teacher, and I am majoring in, essentially, argument. I’m not saying that I know how to structure an argumentative paper better than you (although I’m certainly thinking it, thanks to your ignorance of how a BLOCK QUOTE is formatted), but please at least apply common sense to your grading practices. And if you’re not sure of something, look it up.

The only examples listed above that did not come back in red on a history paper I just received back today are the helpful ones about textual relevance; in fact, my paper had little to no comment on these subjects, those which are actually relevant to history. My point is that making pedantic, stylistic comments that betray your ignorance of the craft of writing do not help anyone, and applying them to a grade is downright wrong. Take College Writing R1A next semester, please, I strongly reccomend it. They’ll get you all sorted out on that formatting question.