Where's your plan?

Plan? What plan? I’m a writing genius!

I started marking the AS writing this morning, but I’m not putting much effort into it because their writing, which is definitely more sophisticated than that of the PAL students, is typically annoyingly inane. They’ve been taught to write vacuous waffle at New Oriental or English First using words and phrases for every occasion, which sound impressive, but say little or nothing as they waste ink and consume space. Actually, that, in my experience, also suits undergraduates quite well. I know lots of them like writing blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, we’re not interested in undergrads today.

We gave the little darlings the opportunity to produce a plan, but because they’re ever so good at writing, they don’t need to plan. Some of them have enough focus to be able to maintain a discussion about an idea for a paragraph although the internal mechanics won’t necessarily be that good. Coherence is usually all right (or sufficient; sentences are rarely incomprehensible, but ideas may get butchered), but cohesion tends to be another matter. The transition from one idea to the next can often be abrupt although outright non sequiturs are less frequent.

I see, though, my day is over, which sends me off to Carrefour to do some shopping. I’d much rather go home and have a snooze, but dying of starvation is a bit of a bitch as the saying goes.