Essay #3 Tip Sheet

Essay #3: Responding to College Freshman Writing

Begin by reading:

“Why College Football Should Be Abolished”

(This is the student essay contained within “How to Say Nothing in 500 Words.” You are responding to the student essay, not to the longer explanation by Paul McHenry Roberts which surrounds it.)

The writing assignment:

Do you think the “D” allegedly earned by the 500-word student essay on college football is overly harsh or is it deserved? Justify your answer.

Writing schedule:

  1.  Think  Monday, February 12 through Wednesday, February 14
  2.  Gather  Thursday, February 15 through Tuesday, February 20
  3.  Draft  Wednesday, February 21 through Tuesday, February 27
  4.  Peer Edit  Wednesday, February 25
  5.  Revise  Thursday, February 29 and Friday, March 1

Discussion:

The original assignment

The original assignment was quite open-ended. It was given in a Friday class: “For Monday you will turn in a five hundred-word composition on college football.”

Rubrics

College English teachers rarely shoot from the hip—they don’t just look at an essay from a distance and decide, based upon gut feelings, whether they like it or not. They are much more likely to use a rubric, which is a specific grading standard. Here are four; take a look at them as you decide what to say about that hapless student’s essay.

Hints for success:

Don’t look for something to complain about

Three comments are quite common in responses to this assignment. All are misfires which will negatively affect the paper’s grade. (Hint: A good beginning point is to go back to the original Paul McHenry Roberts article and read what the teacher said about the essay.)

“The original assignment was unfair.” Perhaps—a busy weekend is a very tight timetable for cranking out a finished essay, but remember that the student could have written anything related to football, and the class had been discussing the topic already. Also remember what you are supposed to be doing. You are not grading the teacher. Excellent teachers can have poor students and poor teachers can have excellent students. Did this paper deserve the grade it received? And if not, what grade would you give instead? (By the way, there is no hint that the whole class got poor grades—apparently at least a few students wrote acceptable papers.)

“There are a lot of grammar and spelling errors.” If you think there are a lot of grammar problems (students usually name run-on sentences as the culprit), quote the offending material and discuss exactly why it’s a grammar problem. Don’t be satisfied with that generalized, abstract complaint: give some concrete evidence. (Note: Your grammar/spelling objections had better be right! If you object to a sentence which has no problems, your essay will not look too good.)

“If I don’t know about it, then it didn’t happen.” Several of my students, after reading this article, wrote that the comment, “There was one case where a high school star was offered a convertible if he would play football for a certain college” was obviously untrue because they had never heard of such a thing. (And of course, because they had never heard of this kind of unethical behavior, the paper deserved its “D” grade.) As a matter of fact, high school players were bribed by recruiters, though the most memorable example was in basketball, not football. The college was Kansas University, the student was Wilt Chamberlain, the year was 1955, and the car was an Oldsmobile.¹ The scandal, widely reported in the media, was a major reason for NCAA regulations that prevent abuses like this from happening now. The Roberts article was written in the mid 1950s, so this was hot current news for him; the fact that it all happened 50 years before you were born doesn’t make it less true. The fact that you never heard of it and cannot imagine it happening doesn’t make it less true.

A bit of plain academic curiosity and awareness would have kept these students from looking like fools.


  1. I did not know this one either, but it seemed worth checking out, and I half-remembered hearing about a basketball scandal, so I used Google to search for “college basketball, convertible, recruiting, scandal.” I knew the approximate date Roberts wrote his article, and I simply dug through a dozen or so Internet hits. That’s how research works.

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The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.
Revised 12/31/23 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.