To ask for it to be remarked?

[QuestionableMouse]

I collected an essay yesterday and I'm really not happy with the grade. I've been given 55% and a '3' (needs to seek help with English) which I don't feel is fair.

Reasons why I was marked down:

• titles formatted wrong. Well yes they are but I was following an incorrect guide that the university had posted and the lecturer had referred us to.

-he's changed some of the words I've used. I used great at one point. He's crossed it out and scribbled good. Something being great or good is a matter of opinion surely? This has happened more than once.

• he's disagreed with my use of semi colons. I'm 100% sure I've used them correctly.

There was a couple more things like that but I can't remember them. I don't feel like he's looked at the content at all (there is only one comment on it out of half a page) and had marked me down for one mistake then style choices.

Does anyone have any experience with this type of thing?

You didn't get a 55 for using semi-colons incorrectly. The main bulk of the mark will have been based on the content. I'm sure if you request a tutorial your lecturer will explain why you got the mark you did. The SPAG corrections are incidental.

Did you clearly answer the question? Might just be a couple of comments but an essay which isn't clearly answering the question will lose many marks. Lots of semi-colons implies long sentences. Academic writing is generally fairly concise with short sentences.

At level one a lot of the work does focus on writing clearly as cardibach states. Much better to develop your writing skills now when your marks don't count towards your final degree classification. You got a pass grade, so unless you think your marks across the year could be borderline I don't see that appealing the grade will make much difference. I would not expect to read 'great' in an academic essay either. There might be other emotive words in there too. Take on board all the feedback, check on any points you aren't clear about and incorporate it into your next assignment.

Sometimes you just have to shrug it off, especially if it doesn't affect your final grade.

It might be worth asking your lecturer to explain what they found wrong with your use of semicolons, for future reference to ensure you get it correct in future papers (and to find out if they really know what they're talking about).

I do agree with others that great and good are both weak in the partial sentence you gave, difficult without more details. I'd probably have gone with something like "The author uses extensive and evocative language to convey the themes of..."

However, I do sympathise, 17 years ago, I did an MBA. For the first two terms, every paper I submitted got excellent feedback on writing style. In the final term, one was returned with a relatively mediocre mark, the only criticisms were writing style.

It still grates, in one instance the word I used was exactly what I wanted to convey, think "minute", corrected to "I think you mean small". The lecturer was American! I was really tempted to batter him to death with a thesaurus.

You can’t appeal professional academic judgement. So I doubt you’ll get a remark. However, you could make an appointment with your tutor to go over your essay to help you understand your feedback, so as to improve your next piece of writing.

If your posts are anything to go by, you do have problems with grammar and expression. Your tutor is trying to help you improve your writing by pointing out errors and suggesting ways to improve your writing. The mark you receive is beside the point - you should reflect on the feedback (corrections and comments) to improve your grammar and expression.

soupy

*sprinklestar believe me, I would absolutely love it if my students could use semi-colons correctly. But I had to have a special ‘common grammar and stylistic errors’ feedback session for my THIRD years this year, revolving largely around semi-colons, comma splices, and fragmentary sentences. More than 50% of these students made frequent such errors in their essays. This is not uncommon across my department and across my sector - humanities department.

Feel free to disregard my experience, borne of many years teaching of course, and extrapolate solely from your own individual circumstances, though...*

I’d let you have the ‘but’ and ‘borne’ but would pull you up on:

1. Using a conjunction after a comma (twice used ‘and’ after a comma)
2. Unnecessary comma (before ‘though)
3. Missed capitalisation of ‘Humanities’
4. Also a query over the grammatical correctness of ‘frequent such errors’

Welliments, I'd stop digging if I were you.

What on earth makes you think "Using a conjunction after a comma" is a problem? OUP house style permits it in lists. Even if you avoid using it in lists of single words it is routinely used by careful writers when elements in a list are longer than one word.

en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/what-is-the-oxford-comma

The other "breach" of your "rule" is even more ludicrous: it's a pair of commas setting off a modifying clause. Americans have explicit rules about restrictive modifying clauses (which are not set off with commas) and non-restrictive modifying clauses (which are), while we tend to figure it out as we go along. "My sister who is blonde works as a lawyer" implies you have more than one sister and "blonde" tells you which one, while "my sister, who is blonde, works as a lawyer" implies you have one sister that happens to be blonde. So that said: "born of my experience of course" is a non-restrictive modifying clause, and properly set off with commas. That there happens to be an and is irrelevant.

In your world, the following fragment:

My sister, who is blonde, and my father, who is old, went for dinner is (a) wrong and (b) would be made "correct" by removing the second comma. Seriously? Do you believe My sister, who is blonde and my father, who is old, went for dinner is correct? Please enlighten us.

You think people should be spelling humanities as a proper noun? I'm as descriptivist as you like, and think falling back to OED is a weak move. But it's lower case IN THE FUCKING HEADWORD in OED. "2. Frequently in the humanities." and has the helpful note "The humanities are typically distinguished from the social sciences in having a significant historical element, in the use of interpretation of texts and artefacts rather than experimental and quantitative methods, and in having an idiographic rather than nomothetic character." On this occasion, "take it up with OED and every university, everywhere" is a reasonable response.

"Frequent such errors" is perfectly fine. The style police will say "a bit legalistic", but it clarifies that the errors are drawn from the group defined earlier in the paragraph.

I don't have a view on the comma that upsets you. I'd use it. I wouldn't complain if someone didn't. Meh.

welliments
What Cuboidal said. Hilariously, you’re wrong on pretty much every count.

TheRagingGirl

You can at some universities.

"Great" is too slangy for academic writing; you could achieve the same by using something like "very good" or "excellent" - or, even better, thinking about what make it so good and saying something like "very effective" or "very evocative".

Plus, in the context of your sentence "the poet makes great use of imagery" it's ambiguous anyway: it's not clear whether you mean "very good" or "extensive".

Jesus guys, it was lighthearted.

it was lighthearted.

A lighthearted list of errors in someone else's prose? Which was the funny part?

I forgot the grammar police didn’t have a sense of humour.

Well you set yourself up as the grammar police, by purporting to identify a list of four errors in my post. As usually is the case with self-declared grammar pedants on Internet forums, you made yourself look like an arse.

Yep, I’m an arse and you sound like a fun person to spend time with.

Lots of good advice here, but the crux of the matter is really, what do you hope the mark to go up to?? To make any difference it would surely have to be increased to 65, and that seems unlikely on a re mark... Chalk it up to experience

I forgot the grammar police didn’t have a sense of humour.

Clearly. You arrived to police the grammar, and you haven't told us a joke yet.

It depends on the exact wording:

'the poet makes great use of imagery...' means 'significant' use of imagary and is no worse than 'good' (which I think would find it's way into the word bin in most primary classrooms...)

'the poet uses great imagery...' would be far too informal.

I think before we give the OP grammatical advice, we should at least model something vaguely correct. Imagary I'll give you as a typo, but "would find it's way into the word bin"? Really?

You don’t need to have your essay remarked, you need to sit down with your tutor and ask for proper feedback. This will enable you to improve your marks in the future.

Writing essays at university is very different from writing essays at school. I received low 50s for most of my first year essays, as I really didn’t understand how to adapt my writing style. As I read more and listened to feedback, I progressed and received 75-85 for all of my final year written work, including my dissertation. It’s an enormous learning curve. Mid 50s is not a terrible grade when you’re halfway through your first year, but I would suggest you need to shift your focus from disputing feedback to learning from it.

You don’t need to have your essay remarked, you need to sit down with your tutor and ask for proper feedback. This will enable you to improve your marks in the future.

This is excellent advice.

I teach in this field at a university with high expectations of student ability and achievement. As you progress through your course, the standard will get higher - we tend to expect more from each essay, as you demonstrate your progress by applying what you’ve already learnt to your next piece of writing. So it wouldn’t be unusual to do well on the first essay, and not so well on the second, if you just do the same thing.

I would have circled ‘great’ in the way you used it and noted it as colloquial and meaningless in the context of a piece of formal academic writing. You need to think about register and tone (some linguists call it ‘code switching’) in writing. Your register and language use need to be appropriate for the medium and the task. For example, this post is probably too formal for an internet message board. On the other hand, part of my task is modelling a particular way of using language so formality is appropriate.

For a piece of literary criticism you really need to dig into your own thinking, to analyse specifically, and as precisely as you can, what it is about the imagery that is so effective.

Also, read as much academic literary criticism as you can - pay attention to the language and tone used.

I had a tough time when I first went to university - it’s difficult to go from getting top marks in a subject to feeling like you’re doing terribly. It took me a while to understand what was expected of me, but eventually I picked it up. Being open to learning these new expectations and changing is what will help you to succeed. I found that my tutors were always happy to sit down with me and go through the things I was struggling with, and help me to understand how to correct them.