#student writing

[heythatcouldbeafunnyuser]

Things I did well in my first wip..

Emotions! The characters feelings were very well written

Made insane thought paths seem logical

This one girl haunted the narrative HARD

Established character friendships that felt genuine

Balanced joy and humor with dramatic adventure

Came up with a pretty frickin cool magic system

Also did a good job of contrasting the worlds that the different characters came from as they all learned more about each other

General concept was super cool also

Things I did NOT do well..

Backstories. Nothing made sense and everything was incredibly cheesy.

The parents. For some reason I decided to write from the mc's parents' povs... I refuse to reread those parts because I just know they were terrible

The villain. This guy's scenes just did not work.

Names. WHY DID I CHOOSE ALL OF THE STUPIDEST NAMES EVER??

The crushes/romance. Me to my former self: Girl you are aroace and have no idea what you're talking about, WHAT ARE YOU DOING???

Plot execution. The vibes were there but the practicals were nowhere to be seen

Also overall it was quite cheesy and painful to read

WHY DID MY CHARACTERS FALL DOWN SO MANY STEEP INCLINES?? (two holes and one cliff that appeared out of nowhere)

I'm so proud of my younger self for working so hard on this story! I don't regret a thing, but I do have some. Thoughts..

[undergradhist]

In my FB Memories today from 2017

Grading one batch of Dante papers while expecting another tomorrow, and so I was moved to send the annual reminder to students that the title of his famous work is not "The Portable Dante" (which is the name of the Penguin paperback we have, containing Mark Musa's translation of the complete "Divine Comedy" and a few other works. [I still fully expect at least one paper to refer to the author as Musa--not in a citation, I mean, but in, like, a "Musa's novel has a mindset on the religious aspect in which is very relatable to the people in today's society" sort of way. May I be proved wrong]).

Anyway, so a student writes back: "So should I quote it as Inferno, Purgatorio, or Paradiso?"

"...It depends on which of those three parts of the work a specific quote comes from," I manage to reply without the ellipsis.

[jessica-marie-baumgartner]

The Pepper Paper is open for submissions for our second volume.

Homeschooled students ages 10-18 can submit their writing and artwork by following the guidelines listed in the post link.

[mournfulroses]

Simone de Beauvoir, from a diary entry featured in Diary of a Philosophy Student

[vvanillavveins]

I don't think we give Jonathan Harker nearly enough credit for his absolutely unhinged choices. In 1897, that pathetic wet cat of a man was written with enough grit, willpower, and raw human stupidity to rival any of our modern horror podcast protagonists. When faced with a centuries-old vampire, in a coffin, drenched in fresh blood, he really thought the best thing to do was to hit it in the face WITH A SHOVEL. The audacity. The misplaced confidence. The sheer desperation. No plan. No hesitation. Running on fear and spite alone. And i fucking love him for it. Truly the character of all time.

[mckitterick]

as a professor who refused to give corporations my students' papers to grow their AI / LLM data so they can churn out crappy versions of essays for lazy people (and because of privacy concerns), I urge all teachers -

Don't fall for it. Don't give corporations your students' work.

I'm talking about Turnitin and its ilk, of course

helping those same corporations that claim to serve the cause of identifying plagiarism and AI-writing detection only increases the scourge of plagiarism / idea theft via AI content generation

I hate so much that professors who still can't figure out how to send messages on Zoom think they're capable of spotting AI writing. Professors are just feeding essays into AI detectors with massive fail rates with absolutely zero critical thought about the tools they're using. I moved across state lines. I've spent years of my life trying to get this degree. But at any moment I could be expelled because I got a false positive from a detector that tells you ChatGPT wrote Anna Karenina.

[thedeadpoets-blog]

late night studying in october 🍂☕️🎃📚

[a-lady-and-her-quill]

[malusokay]

What's the point of a diary if you're not lying in it?

On Anaïs Nin, literary self-mythologizing, and why personal writing should always be slightly dishonest. (from my substack)

If you’re not lying in your diary, you’re just journaling, and journaling is for people who don’t know how to edit.

A diary is not a record of events; it is an act of creation. The best diarists know this instinctively. Anaïs Nin knew it better than anyone. Her diaries were not mere confessions but performances, half-lit mirrors where the truth shimmered, distorted but no less real.

Nin understood that life is not lived in a single register. Her diaries are a study in contradiction—one moment, she is in love; the next, repulsed. She is independent yet wholly consumed by those around her. But contradiction isn’t falsehood; it’s literature. She rewrote and edited her diaries, sculpting herself into the character she wanted to be. And is that really so dishonest?

People love to be outraged by the idea of a diary that is not entirely factual. But fact is not the same as truth. Diaries, at their best, are emotional truths, shaped by mood, by desire, by the need to impose a narrative on the chaos of daily life. Nin was not interested in being objective—she was interested in being immortal. She once wrote, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” But why stop at tasting? Why not rewrite, reshape, embellish? If we can curate the lives we present to others, why should we not do the same for the versions of ourselves we leave behind?

Nin herself was a master of this. She edited her diaries before publication, removing, refining, turning herself into a protagonist. She blurred lines, shifted timelines, made herself more alluring. She called it shaping reality. Others call it lying. The truth, of course, is that all personal writing is selective. Even in confession, there is curation.

The danger, of course, is that history will take the performance at face value. That the diary, once private, will harden into biography. But this, too, is a kind of truth. A diary is not a static object. It lives, it breathes, it deceives, but always in service of something larger than the mundane details of existence.

[evadneares]

[hesbuckcompton-baby]

people who don't study history will simply never understand the joy of reading historian beef. there's nothing like it

[2-dsimp]

Imagine a yandere college student x milf reader

Milf reader who thinks they’re past their prime admittedly they’re in early-mid 40s. They’re a single mother of three kids including the eldest son who’s the yandere’s best friend. Milf reader is always there giving support to both their son and especially said bestfriend. That happened to be obsessed with you right at the start of their freshman year of college. After you managed to comfort him by telling him that being considered abnormal by his peers. Isn’t bad but something he should be proud about, after all originality is a keen quality to have nowadays.

Unfortunately the college student took your words to heart in the most peculiar of ways…

You got stood up. Again. You tried your hardest to get back into the dating scene. But all your suitors got cold feet standing you up at the last minute. You were devastated all that time wasted on getting all dolled up for a no show. But little did you know that your son’s bestfriend was there to photograph you in all your glory. Before coincidentally bumping into you, asking if you could help him out with some cooking recipes. Since you were the no1 chef in his eyes, hell you could serve him dog kibble and he’d eat it like it was heaven on earth.

If only you had looked closer you may have noticed a Glock imprint. Within his signature trench coat with many pockets. Each dedicated to conceal the questionable items he brought whenever you had an outing set. The college boy always did have a knack for acing target practice at the gun range. And all your former suitors served to be a good way for him to destress. There’s no way he’d let you end up with anyone besides himself.

———/———-/————-

should I expand more on this? 👀

[puffycinnabunny]

Electric field or smt

[jessica-marie-baumgartner]

A perfect opportunity for homeschooled students to get published!

[mournfulroses]

Simone de Beauvoir, from a diary entry featured in Diary of a Philosophy Student