Monday, September 20, 2004

It is only fitting that my paper should be terrible

I am writing a paper on Petrarch and it's terrible. It has absolutely no structure. I'm answering the questions posed in the order they were listed in the topic and three pages in, I have realized that there is absolutely no way I can structure my paper that way. It's all over the place. I'm requoting passages to refer to different aspects of the same line, inserting things here or there with no real rhyme or reason. I'm pretty much just doing this off the cuff. I'm going to have to write the four to five pages and completely reorder everything I've written, which hopefully will just be a matter of cutting and pasting but more likely than not will involve some serious rewriting.

Unless I entitle it "Scattered Prose" and tell my professor that this was done intentionally to mimic the style of Petrarch. Then I can say "I hope this vague and wandering prose direct itself at last to the one, true, certain, and never-ending good." Think he'd buy it? I could have the first conceptual essay in college humanities history.

(By the way ten points to anyone who knows what in God's name I'm talking about and 1000 points to anyone who wants to fix my abhorrent essay)

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