Medieval Mess

So I'm mid-way through exams right now, having finished 2.5 of my 6 finals. (The 0.5 denotes the take-home exam I have until 3pm today to finish.) Yesterday was my Chaucer final, which was difficult! But I wasn't alone in my suffering; the two friends I made there apparently also struggled.

Anyway, after the exam, we received our term papers back. And I got a relatively good mark (82). My prof left some really funny comments though. Some of them were fairly legitimate, pointing out where I could have been more specific or accurate. But others just made me laugh. For one part, I wrote that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was a credit to World Literature, being one of the few masterpieces that hold such a diverse collection of sociolects and social classes intermingling. And then I footnoted that with Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢), saying that it was another such example from Qing Chinese Literature. Prof writes: "Thanks for the ref."

My favourite, however, was in the concluding/general comments, wherein he wrote: "You display an odd mix of gorgeous writing and very sloppy errors. Proofread!" It was both flattering and embarrassing. The very sloppy errors mainly stem from the fact that half the essay was written in 3 hours the day that it was due. And these produced silly errors that a simple read-through would have caught. (Things like "by" instead "but"; "from" instead of "form"; punctuation before/after an end-quote.) But he still awarded me an 80+, so I suppose there was some merit to my mad ravings. The prof actually ended with "You have much potential in your prose," which made me smile. Also made me frown, because it meant I still have a ways to go before I achieve this hypothetical literary standard.