A Competent and Exceptional Essay
When I give a paper a B grade, I’m saying that the essay is competent.
By competent, the essay has a solid thesis, is well organized, has adequate paragraph development, has helpful transitions, and uses the right amount of outside sources to support the author’s claims and assertions.
However, the word competent also points to certain derogatory characteristics: The competent essay tends toward cliché, truisms, aphorisms, and familiar, predictable, “safe” territory.
As a result, the competent essay is stale and boring so that the reader feels as if he is slogging through the exposition and is eager to get to the “finish line.”
In contrast, the exceptional essay is an A paper because it has all the characteristics of being precisely what it is called, exceptional:
The exceptional essay has surprises, taking the reader where he didn’t expect to go. “Wow, I never imagined I’d arrive here,” the reader thinks to himself. “Who in the hell wrote this gem,” the reader continues. “I want to know this person. I want to have some of this person’s greatness. My God, the more I think about it, this writer is so much smarter than I am, I think I’m jealous.”
The exceptional essay has the “wow factor” in terms of its intellectual muscle flexing, its complexity, its insights, its ability to grasp contradictions and paradoxes of the human condition, its ability to grasp dichotomies and tug on both ends of those dichotomies with equal rigor.
The exceptional essay has muscular sentence structure with no “steak fat” or filler as it relies on a precise, diverse word choice and is spoken with a powerful, confident voice that makes the essay a pleasure to read.
The exceptional essay does not use sanctimonious, self-regarding, long-winded rhetoric to bore and chafe the reader with the writer’s sense of self-righteous, bombastic rectitude. Rather, when the exceptional essay does dip into the thesaurus of “surprise words,” the words are “perfect for the occasion” or are used with acid-tongued irony.
The exceptional essay does not hide behind a variety of sources because it is too shy to reveal its feeble voice; instead, the exceptional essay relies mostly on the writer’s dominant voice, the Alpha Dog of the exposition, using the research material as “small pack dogs” or assistants to the Alpha Dog.
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