Confessions of an Infinitive Splitter

In five weeks I’ve written five papers for my Aesthetics class. I’ve gotten an A on all of them (of course I did!) but in the professor’s remarks at the bottom of each review, she’s written, “split infinitives.”

I know. I do that sometimes.

As a conversational writer, I type my thoughts and construct my points in a casual manner. Academic writing is a huge challenge because I’m not fancy. I use contractions and I start sentences with a conjunctions. And furthermore, I split infinitives because I just do.

Writing in a scholarly manner has taken far more concentration than transcribing an interview and compile it into a feature story. I could probably write a traditional news story according to the Inverted Pyramid model faster than I can write a 750-word summary of “On the Aesthetic Education of a Man” by Friedrich Schiller (which is due by midnight on Sunday).

Anyhow, I love graduate school so far, but that’s mainly because graduate school is about studying what you want verses studying what you have to. And even though I don’t totally love Greek philosophy in regards to literary aesthetics, it’s way better than math. Anything is better than math.

And another thing. Online learning is far more evolved than I anticipated. We submit our papers to turnitin.com, a website that scans your work for originality. Once your work is loaded the program returns to you a “percentage of likeness” found in your paper as compared to other works in their database. Genius AND nerve-wracking! My first three papers came back with 0% likeness, but the last two came back with 1% likeness, which scared me to death. My work is one percent simliar to someone else’s work. I’m a little uncomfortable with this since I take a strong moral stance on plagiarism. When I confessed my one percent to Chuck, he was all, “Get over it. It’s not a big deal,” to which I replied, “IT’S A HUGE DEAL.”

It really isn’t a big deal, but the perfectionist in me will work steadily to knock that one percent back down to zero.

Side bar: Jackson is crazy excited about Man of Steel, which is in theaters NOW. We shall see it as soon as life permits. Here’s hoping it’s not as PG-13 as Iron Man 3 was. That was a serious near-R, if you ask me.

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