Respecting the Process

I got a B- on a paper I turned in for a comparative studies class in grad school. I didn’t rise to the challenge and take the assignment seriously. Others were cut out for evaluating the minutia of academic research and writing dissertations from studies they had conducted, I told myself.  I learned the importance of elevating the assignment through effort and respect for format. My professor did me a favor by grading me poorly and laying out reasons for why formats are not flexible. 

   

The paper was a review of a LOOOONG book on how Bush and the Iraq war proved that the United States was entering a phase of aggressive nation building.  The author’s thesis was far richer and subtler than my evaluation suggests, remember though I didn’t do the book justice. He lost me at the literature review, the first part. Some people love words, their own mostly. If his words had weight they would have crushed me. He used them the way drill sergeants use criticism, unsparingly.

I gave a 15 minute summation of the book. Highlighted the main points for class discussion and turned in a review of the book with my own analysis. I handed in a stinker of a paper and knew it. It barely met the length requirement, included an incoherent argument and used material that supported a different conclusion. It was lazy and rushed; the assignment brought out the worst in me. I got assigned the toughest book in class written by the biggest windbag allowed to walk across the graduation stage at Harvard. He wore a tweed jacket with elbow patches and smoked a pipe through smiling lips at the dreck he forced me to read (none of that is true).

My professor didn’t cut me any slack and wrote a full page explaining why my piece wasn’t exactly up to par (no kidding). It technically met the requirements for number of sources, types of sources and page length. But the rest was a collection of academic research papers and hastily arranged quotes only marginally related to the subject. I slapped together a menu of pseudo-intellectual claptrap and pasted it to Word like a seamstress putting together a quilt. It’s almost like I said “I understand what the format should look like, but how about this instead?”

I disregarded the rules for what a book review should be. Why did I do it that way? It was easier. I didn’t have time to do it right. I didn’t understand the material I was researching. I didn’t like the point the author made; I didn’t agree with his argument, as much as I could understand of it.

All were excuses in my head. All were true but shouldn’t have mattered. I signed up for the class and decided to play by my own rules. Can you imagine an Olympic triathlete completing only part of his race? He stops after swimming and biking telling the judge, “I don’t like the rules on completing 3 events. It’s much easier to pick the two I am good at.”

We don’t get choices like that in life; we play the game we signed up for. We do the work even when we hate the material, the professor, the class and the book’s thesis. Just so you know a B isn’t a terrible grade but in Grad school a B- is really a C. It means, you ‘phoned it in son’ go back and write a decent paper. I wasn’t happy with the grade but should have seen it coming. His criticism taught me that paying for class and showing up aren’t enough.

With just a little effort I could have turned in an organized paper. I made a bargain with myself to slack off a little, just this time I thought. The book was nonsense anyway and the poor writing shouldn’t matter that much. The teacher had other thoughts and showed me that writing assignments have formats and rules must be followed. I won’t say I never slack off anymore but I do respect process and format more than ever. My writing improved markedly after that, as did my respect for process.