In Praise of Fast Food By Rachael Laudan Published: February 2010 Modern, fast, processed food is a disaster. That, at least, is the message conveyed by newspapers and magazines, on television programs, and in cookbooks. It is a mark of sophistication to bemoan the steel roller mill and supermarket bread while yearning for stoneground flour and brick ovens; to seek out heirloom apples while despising modern tomatoes; to be hostile to agronomists who develop high-yielding crops and to home economists who invent recipes for General Mills. My culinary style, like so many people’s, was created by those who scorned industrialized food; culinary Luddites, we could call them, after the 19th-century English workers who abhorred the machines that were destroying their way of life. I learned to cook from the books of Elizabeth David, who urged us to sweep our cupboards “clean for ever of the cluttering debris of commercial sauce bottles and all synthetic aids to flavoring.” I rush to the newsstand to pick up Saveur with its promise to teach me to “savor a world of authentic cuisine.” Culinary Luddism has come to involve more than just taste, however; it has also presented itself as a moral and political crusade—and it is here that I begin to back off. The reason is not far to seek: because I am a historian. As a historian I cannot accept the account of the past implied by this movement: the sunny, rural days of yore contrasted with the gray industrial present. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast; artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front. That food should be fresh and natural has become an article of faith. It comes as something of a shock to realize that this is a latter-day creed. For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad. Fresh meat was rank and tough, fresh fruits inedibly sour, fresh vegetables bitter. Natural was unreliable. Fresh milk soured; eggs went rotten. Everywhere seasons of plenty were followed by seasons of hunger. Natural was also usually indigestible. Grains, which supplied 50 to 90 percent of the calories in most societies, have to be threshed, ground, and cooked to make them edible. So to make food tasty, safe, digestible, and healthy, our forebears bred, ground, soaked, leached, curdled, fermented, and cooked naturally occurring plants and animals until they were literally beaten into submission. They created sweet oranges and juicy apples and non-bitter legumes, happily abandoning their more natural but less tasty ancestors. They built granaries, dried their meat and their fruit, salted and smoked their fish, curdled and fermented their dairy products, and cheerfully used additives and preservatives—sugar, salt, oil, vinegar, lye—to make edible foodstuffs. Eating fresh, natural food was regarded with suspicion verging on horror; only the uncivilized, the poor, and the starving resorted to it. When the ancient Greeks took it as a sign of bad times if people were driven to eat greens and root vegetables, they were rehearsing common wisdom. Happiness was not a verdant Garden of Eden abounding in fresh fruits, but a securely locked storehouse jammed with preserved, processed foods. As for slow food, it is easy to wax nostalgic about a time when families and friends met to relax over delicious food, and to forget that, far from being an invention of the late 20th century, fast food has been a mainstay of every society. Hunters tracking their prey, shepherds tending their flocks, soldiers on campaign, and farmers rushing to get in the harvest all needed food that could be eaten quickly and away from home. The Greeks roasted barley and ground it into a meal to eat straight or mixed with water, milk, or butter (as Tibetans still do), while the Aztecs ground roasted maize and mixed it with water (as Mexicans still do). What about the idea that the best food was country food, handmade by artisans? That food came from the country goes without saying. The presumed corollary—that country people ate better than city dwellers—does not. Few who worked the land were independent peasants baking their own bread and salting down their own pig. Most were burdened with heavy taxes and rents paid in kind (that is, food); or worse, they were indentured, serfs, or slaves. They subsisted on what was left over, getting by on thin gruels and gritty flatbreads. The dishes we call ethnic and assume to be of peasant origin were invented for the urban, or at least urbane, aristocrats who collected the surplus. This is as true of the lasagna of northern Italy as it is of the chicken korma of Mughal Delhi, the moo shu pork of imperial China, and the pilafs, stuffed vegetables, and baklava of the great Ottoman palace in Istanbul. Cities have always enjoyed the best food and have invariably been the focal points of culinary innovation. Nor are most “traditional foods” very old. For every prized dish that goes back 2,000 years, a dozen have been invented in the last 200. The French baguette? A 20th-century phenomenon, adopted nationwide only after World War II. Greek moussaka? Created in the early 20th century in an attempt to Frenchify Greek food. Tequila? Promoted as the national drink of Mexico during the 1930s by the Mexican film industry. These are indisputable facts of history, though if you point them out you will be met with stares of disbelief. Were old foods more healthful than ours? Inherent in this vague notion are several different claims, among them that foods were less dangerous, that diets were better balanced. Yet while we fret about pesticides on apples and mercury in tuna, we should remember that ingesting food is and always has been dangerous. Many plants contain both toxins and carcinogens. Grilling and frying add more. Bread was likely to be stretched with chalk, pepper adulterated with the sweepings of warehouse floors, and sausage stuffed with all the horrors famously exposed by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle. By the standard measures of health and nutrition—life expectancy and height—our ancestors were far worse off than we are. Much of the blame was due to diet, exacerbated by living conditions and infections that affect the body’s ability to use food. No amount of nostalgia for the pastoral foods of the distant past can wish away the fact that our ancestors lived mean, short lives, constantly afflicted with diseases, many of which can be directly attributed to what they did and did not eat. Historical myths, though, can mislead as much by what they don’t say as by what they do say— and nostalgia for the past typically glosses over the moral problems intrinsic to the labor of producing food. Most men were born to a life of labor in the fields, most women to a life of grinding, chopping, and cooking. “Servitude,” said my mother as she prepared home-cooked breakfast, dinner, and tea for 8 to 10 people 365 days a year. She was right. Churning butter and skinning and cleaning hares, without the option of picking up the phone for a pizza if something goes wrong, is unremitting, unforgiving toil. Perhaps, though, my mother did not realize how much worse her lot might have been. She could at least buy our bread. In Mexico, at the same time, women without servants could expect to spend five hours a day kneeling at the grindstone preparing the dough for the family’s tortillas. In the first half of the 20th century, Italians embraced factory-made pasta and canned tomatoes. In the second half, Japanese women welcomed factory-made bread because they could sleep a little longer instead of getting up to make rice. As supermarkets appeared in Eastern Europe, people rejoiced at the convenience of ready-made goods. For all, culinary modernism had proved what was wanted: food that was processed, preservable, industrial, novel, and fast, the food of the elite at a price everyone could afford. Where modern food became available, people grew taller and stronger and lived longer. Men had choices other than hard agricultural labor; women had choices other than kneeling at the metate five hours a day. So the sunlit past of the culinary Luddites never existed. So their ethos is based not on history but on a fairy tale. So what? Certainly no one would deny that an industrialized food supply has its own problems. Perhaps we should eat more fresh, natural, local, artisanal, slow food. Does it matter if the history is not quite right? It matters quite a bit, I believe. If we do not understand that most people had no choice but to devote their lives to growing and cooking food, we are incapable of comprehending that modern food allows us unparalleled choices not just of diet but of what to do with our lives. If we urge the Mexican to stay at her metate, the farmer to stay at his olive press, the housewife to stay at her stove, all so that we may eat handmade tortillas, traditionally pressed olive oil, and home-cooked meals, we are assuming the mantle of the aristocrats of old. If we fail to understand how scant and monotonous most traditional diets were, we can misunderstand the “ethnic foods” we encounter in cookbooks, at restaurants, or on our travels. We can represent the peoples of the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, India, or Mexico as pawns at the mercy of multi-national corporations bent on selling trashy modern products—failing to appreciate that, like us, they enjoy a choice of goods in the market. A Mexican friend, suffering from one too many foreign visitors who chided her because she offered Italian food, complained, “Why can’t we eat spaghetti, too?” If we assume that good food maps neatly onto old or slow or homemade food, we miss the fact that lots of industrial foods are better. Certainly no one with a grindstone will ever produce chocolate as suave as that produced by conching in a machine for 72 hours. And let us not forget that the current popularity of Italian food owes much to two convenience foods that even purists love, factory pasta and canned tomatoes. Far from fleeing them, we should be clamoring for more high-quality industrial foods. If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples—salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea—produced by food corporations. Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things: We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they’ve done us all a service by teaching us how to use the bounty delivered to us by (ironically) the global economy. Their ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving. Nostalgia is not what we need. What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialized food, not one that dismisses it; an ethos that opens choices for everyone, not one that closes them for many so that a few may enjoy their labor; and an ethos that does not prejudge, but decides case by case when natural is preferable to processed, fresh to preserved, old to new, slow to fast, artisanal to industrial. Such an ethos, and not a timorous Luddism, is what will impel us to create the matchless modern cuisines appropriate to our time. LET IT SNOW By David Sedaris Winters were frustratingly mild in North Carolina, but the year I was in the fifth grade we got lucky. Snow fell, and, for the first time in years, it accumulated. School was cancelled, and two days later we got lucky again. There were eight inches on the ground, and, rather than melting, it froze. On the fifth day of our vacation, my mother had a little breakdown. Our presence had disrupted the secret life she led while we were at school, and when she could no longer take it she threw us out. It wasn’t a gentle request but something closer to an eviction. “Get the hell out of my house,” she said. We reminded her that it was our house, too, and she opened the front door and shoved us into the carport. “And stay out!” she shouted. My sisters and I went down the hill and sledded with other children from the neighborhood. A few hours later, we returned home, surprised to find that the door was locked. “Oh, come on,” we said. I rang the bell, and when no one answered we went to the window and saw our mother in the kitchen, watching television. Normally she waited until five o’clock to have a drink, but for the past few days she’d been making an exception. Drinking didn’t count if you followed a glass of wine with a cup of coffee, and so she had a goblet and a mug positioned before her on the countertop. “Hey!” we yelled. “Open the door. It’s us.” We knocked on the pane and, without looking in our direction, she refilled her goblet and left the room. “That bitch,” my sister Lisa said. We pounded again and again, and when our mother failed to answer we went around back and threw snowballs at her bedroom window. “You are going to be in so much trouble when Dad gets home!” we shouted, and in response my mother pulled the drapes. Dusk approached, and as it grew colder it occurred to us that we could possibly die. It happened, surely. Selfish mothers wanted the house to themselves and their children were discovered years later, frozen like mastodons in blocks of ice. My sister Gretchen suggested that we call our father, but none of us knew his number, and he probably wouldn’t have done anything anyway. He’d gone to work specifically to escape our mother, and between the weather and her mood it could be hours, or even days, before he returned home. “One of us should get hit by a car,” I said. “That would teach the both of them.” I pictured Gretchen, her life hanging by a thread as my parents paced the halls of Rex Hospital, wishing they had been more attentive. It was really the perfect solution. With her out of the way, the rest of us would be more valuable and have a bit more room to spread out. “Gretchen, go lie in the street.” “Make Amy do it,” she said. Amy, in turn, pushed it off on Tiffany, who was the youngest and had no concept of death. “It’s like sleeping,” we told her. “Only you get a canopy bed.” Poor Tiffany. She’d do just about anything in return for a little affection. All you had to do was call her Tiff, and whatever you wanted was yours: her allowance, her dinner, the contents of her Easter basket. Her eagerness to please was absolute and naked. When we asked her to lie in the middle of the street, her only question was “Where?” We chose a quiet dip between two hills, a spot where drivers were almost required to skid out of control. She took her place, this six-year-old in a butter-colored coat, and we gathered on the curb to watch. The first car to come along belonged to a neighbor, a fellow-Yankee who had outfitted his tires with chains and stopped a few feet from our sister’s body. “Is that a person?” he asked. “Well, sort of,” Lisa said. She explained that we’d been locked out of our house, and, while the man appeared to accept it as a reasonable explanation, I’m pretty sure he was the one who told on us. Another car passed, and then we saw our mother, this puffy figure awkwardly negotiating the crest of the hill. She did not own a pair of pants, and her legs were buried to the calf in snow. We wanted to send her home, to kick her out of nature just as she had kicked us out of the house, but it was hard to stay angry at someone that pitiful-looking. “Are you wearing your loafers?” Lisa asked, and in response our mother raised a bare foot. “I was wearing loafers,” she said. “I mean, really, it was there a second ago.” This was how things went. One moment she was locking us out of our own house and the next we were rooting around in the snow, looking for her left shoe. “Oh, forget about it,” she said. “It’ll turn up in a few days.” Gretchen fitted her cap over my mother’s foot. Lisa secured it with her scarf, and, surrounding her tightly on all sides, we made our way home. ‘The Old Man Isn’t There Anymore’ By Kellie Schmitt I found myself in a Chinese funeral parlor because of a phone call I made to my cleaning lady. The previous evening, my husband Gregg had seen our neighbors crying in the hallway. We’d wondered if the old grandpa, the one with the buzz-cut hair, had died. Gregg had suggested we shouldn’t interfere, but curiosity had gotten the best of me. I’d called the all-knowing cleaning lady. “Do you know why the neighbors,” I paused. I knew the word in Mandarin for “crying” but not hallway. “Do you know why the neighbors are very sad?” I asked. “The old man isn’t there anymore,” she replied, which I guessed was her baby Chinese way of telling me he died. “Ah, the old man who lives on the second floor?” I asked. Even though we had lived in this old three-story house in Shanghai for more than a year, I couldn’t map out the neighbors and where they resided. While we lived in a spacious apartment on the renovated top floor, the other two floors remained as they had been during the height of Communism: cheap, basic and subdivided. As a result, we shared the house with many neighbors. They’d pop out of doorways, hallways, and hidden bathrooms, often wearing just slippers and underwear. There were at least a dozen, all local Shanghainese. When we had first seen the apartment, I had created stories in my head of the relationships we’d establish with our cohabitants. I’d wander into their kitchens in the late afternoon and we’d sit around sipping green tea and chatting in Chinese about our lives. That fairy-tale ended when we moved in: Nobody would even say hello to us. I grilled our Chinese teacher for an explanation. Am I saying ni hao wrong? Was there some moving-in etiquette that I’d forgotten? In China, do people not speak to those who walk around in their underwear under the same roof? My teacher said she wasn’t sure. Still, I was persistent. I would repeatedly try to engage them, saying hello at every encounter. Sometimes, I’d offer a comment on the weather, or tell the grandpa with the buzz cut: “We’re off to America for two weeks! See you when we get back!” Around month three, I got a disgruntled nod from one of the underwear men. One day, the second-floor dad, who was always cooking in the communal kitchen, told me his family’s white cat liked me. And, miraculously, when I returned from Christmas vacation with two heavy suitcases, the burly second-floor mom helped me lug them up the steep wooden stairs. We had turned a corner. I was so grateful that I wanted to show my appreciation. I dashed down the stairs and offered the mom and grandpa a plate of fresh brownies. Grandpa didn’t say anything, just looked at me with a bemused smile. I shoved one onto his plate, blushing as it occurred to me that Chinese traditionally don’t like excessively sweet Western desserts. From there, I progressed to exchanging pleasantries, mostly commenting on the lazy white cat who liked to sleep all day in the nook beneath the banister. When I hung up the phone with the cleaning lady, I made the bold decision to buy sympathy flowers. After all, grandpa and I had often exchanged hellos. He would stand in his undershirt in the doorway, a stout man with full cheeks and an easy smile. His face had few wrinkles though it was patterned with age spots, and I had imagined he was in his 70s. He always looked perplexed by our presence and I’d sometimes wonder what the China of his youth was like, when the country was closed to the West. What a contrast to be spending his final days living a floor away from two Americans. With my basket of roses in hand, I knocked on the family’s door. The dad, dressed in loose white fabric, opened it with a surprised smile. In Chinese, he said, over and over, that I was too polite. For the first time, he beckoned me into their one-room space, now covered in white floral arrangements. The sweet scent of lilies perfumed the air. My local florist didn’t do funeral-specific arrangements so I’d asked her to create an appropriate alternative. Apparently something got lost in the translation. Nobody had mentioned I should have requested white, the color associated with death in China. The mom wrote my Chinese name, 可莉, on a long paper scroll and hung it across my scarletcolored flowers like a beauty pageant sash. Great, I thought. Now everyone will know who got the wrong color. Their rarely-seen, 25-year-old daughter, Lili, spoke up in English. She explained that her grandfather had died from cancer, and while they were very sad, it was considered a good omen for the family that he had a long life. “We would be very honored if you’d attend the funeral on Saturday,” she said. “Since he died at 91, it’s a joyous occasion and we want you to be there.” I deflected the offer, using the words I had learned for “don’t want to bother you.” I was aware that the Chinese often extended invites just to be polite. It was my job to refuse. Still, they insisted and insisted, which made me wonder if they were seriously asking me to attend grandpa’s funeral. When they mentioned that it would mean a lot to the deceased, I wavered. And when they told me that everyone who attends will also live a long life, I finally agreed. As soon as our coach arrived at the funeral home that Saturday, Lili began translating the remarks of the passersby: Wow a foreigner is here! What is a foreigner doing here? We’ve never seen a foreigner here. As we silently filed into the room, trumpets and saxophones sounded, a little off-key, punctuated with a clash of symbols. We all wore black fabric swatches pinned to our arms to acknowledge we were part of the grieving party. Inside, there were about 30 people, mostly family and some old friends. I urged Lili to join her family in the front while I shuffled to the back of the room. The emcee orchestrated the order of events with short commentaries. Soon, the microphone was given to the mom’s older sister. I was able to follow her speech for about two sentences, up to the point where she said she’d be representing her siblings. She quickly lost me, but I still understood the parts where she cried, “Baba,” or daddy, then sobbed. She wailed, her voice broke, and then she repeated it, “Baba, Baba.” In the front row, her three sisters joined the chorus. There was something about the sister’s impassioned cry to her daddy that stirred my own emotions. Suddenly the grandpa was my own father, or my mother’s father, who’d died young, years before I was born. Tears filled my eyes, and before long, I was turning my face toward the lilies to hide my sobs. Now I wasn’t just the foreigner, I was the foreigner drawing attention to herself by crying at her old neighbor’s funeral, a neighbor with whom she had only exchanged ni haos. I watched Lili in the front row, leaning slightly against her father, and I was filled with longing for my own family. They were thousands of miles away in Baltimore, and I hadn’t seen them in months. After the speeches, we filed around the coffin in a circle. I could see my red flowers positioned on the mantle directly in front of the casket. I snuck a glimpse at the grandfather. He was mostly obscured under mounds of flowers, but his bruised face looked much older than I remembered, his hair grayer. I focused on the actions of the people going before me—a ritual sequence of pauses and bows. I sighed with relief when I passed the casket and entered the receiving line of grieving family members. The ceremony ended at the crematorium. We walked down a hallway past orange plastic chairs and crammed, elbow to elbow, into a small room. The casket, now closed, sat in an elevator shaft of sorts with a row of buttons. This was the last chance to say goodbye before plunging grandpa into the depths. Lili whispered: “We paid extra so he’d go to the fire alone.” Apparently, there had been some problems with getting the wrong ashes if you went economy style, and had your loved one cremated alongside other people. Perhaps Chinese are more comfortable with the inner workings of cremation since, in crowded cities like Shanghai, the rate of cremation approaches 100 percent. I felt uneasy though as I watched the staff send grandpa into the fire. Afterward, we did a final walk around the place, this time tossing the black fabric patches we had worn on our arms into an outdoor fireplace. Then we each took one leaping step forward— away from the fire—to help the deceased transcend the gap between life and death. Before boarding the bus, we all sipped sugar water, a symbol of heavenly bliss that came in the form of iced tea juice boxes. As we headed back on the bus, I tried to justify my presence at grandpa’s funeral. “Once, I brought him a freshly-made extra chocolate brownie,” I told Lily, brightly. “I am not sure if he ate it, but he was sitting there smiling in the kitchen.” “Really?” she said, looking at me a bit strangely. I figured she didn’t know the English for brownie so she wasn’t quite sure what I had offered him. We didn’t have much more to chat about, so we sat in silence and watched the skyscrapers emerge again. Back downtown, at the post-ceremony lunch, I struggled to eat a helping of chicken feet as the entire table watched. Apart from that, though, it seemed as if I had made it through my first Chinese funeral with minimal social missteps. Maybe I was finally getting into the swing of life in China. Then one day I breezed down the stairs and saw a familiar silhouette in the second-floor kitchen. I grasped the banister and stared. If I believed in ghosts, I might have fainted in fear. It was the old grandfather, the same buzz-cut hair, the thin white undershirt, even that same bemused look he always gave me. This elderly man, I realized, must have been just another of the numerous neighbors, without any familial relation to mom, dad and Lili. But, if it wasn’t the buzz-cut man in the coffin, who was it? And had I ever even met him? I realized that I had unknowingly committed the most egregious of cultural misunderstandings. Forget the glaring red bouquet, my self-conscious sobs, or my battle with the chicken feet; I have absolutely no idea whose funeral I attended. I kept that information to myself, though, and focused on getting to know the family downstairs. Since the funeral, our relationship achieved a new level of familiarity. The dad offered to teach me how to cook Kung Pao chicken. Lili invited me for tea, and asked for advice on her latest love interest. The mom insisted on carrying my luggage down the stairs, even if it was only a duffel bag. And, without fail, every single time we passed in the hallway, they gave me a friendly ni hao. Rubric for Composition I Paper THREE (The Evaluation Paper) *Paper Three - Evaluation/Analysis Paper 100 3 – 4 Complete pages Based upon the student’s own evaluation/analysis and the information gained from one of the assigned Faigley readings – “Let It Snow,” “The Old Man Isn’t There Anymore,” and “In Praise of Fast Food,” -- a 3-4 page evaluation paper will be constructed by the student. Students may also evaluate “The Danger of a Single Story” or “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” or “Technology Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say”. Note -- This paper will be an analysis/evaluation paper, not a plot summary. A strong position-based thesis, in-text citations, and a Work(s) Cited page must be included with this paper; however, the Work(s) Cited page does NOT count as part of the required 3-4 pages. Finally, the paper should include no or very little use of outside sources other than the primary source that is being evaluated. **This assignment addresses course competencies 1, 2, 3 and 5. -Use your LB Handbook for Works Cited entries in an anthology: example 27, p. 463. Use of the first person (I and we) and second person (you and all of its forms) is not acceptable. **Assignments that do not meet the specific paper guidelines as set forth in the syllabus will receive a grade of zero. Total Possible Points Paper Requirements 5 *Length requirement met-*Any paper that is significantly shorter than the minimum length requirement will result in an automatic 10-point deduction. See the syllabus for requirements. *Times New Roman. *Font size 12. *Double spaced. * The paper has a title and correct MLA heading, etc. Point Deductions Introduction *Compelling. *Strong thesis or controlling idea. * Grabs the reader’s attention. *Is general and outlines the main points of the body paragraphs. *The thesis appears at the end of the introduction, and it clearly states the writer’s evaluation. 15 Body Paragraphs *Contains controlling topic sentences and supporting details. *Coherent. *Unified. * Contains evidence from one of the assigned Faigley readings or other approved topic for this paper. See the syllabus for approved topics for this paper. * Uses adequate transitional devices. * Body paragraphs are evaluative in nature, avoid plot summary, and contain evidence from the source being evaluated. *A paper that focuses 25 Introductions that are not concise. -5 Introductions that do not have a clear and arguable thesis. -5 Introductions that are not compelling and contain announcements such as “in this paper”, etc. -5 Paragraphs that are not developed with adequate support will result in 5point deductions each. Paragraphs that do not contribute to the original thesis or ideas set forth I the introduction will result in 5-point deductions each. *Body paragraphs that do not contain controlling topic sentences, are not unified and coherent will result in 3-point deductions each for the first paper and 5-point deductions each in subsequent papers. primarily on plot summary will suffer an automatic 25-point deduction for this area of the rubric. Conclusion 10 *Sums up the main points of the paper. *Does not leave the reader “hanging.” * Sums up the original thesis in different words. * Does NOT introduce new ideas that are not covered in the body paragraphs. * The conclusion should be concise. Standard English 15 *Word choices and level of diction appropriate to the college level. *Spelling. *Avoids use of contractions. *Avoids use of the second person. *Avoids use of the first person. *Pronouns agree *Subjects and verbs agree. * Maintains consistent tense and/or demonstrates logical shifts in tense. *Three (3) points will be deducted for the first paper for failure to effectively conclude. Five (5) points will be deducted for each subsequent paper. *Use of slang, inappropriate language, and informal diction will result in various deductions as deemed by the instructor. Pronoun errors and subject/verb agreement errors will count as a 1-point deduction for each error. *Pronoun errors and subject/verb agreement errors will count as a 1point deduction for each error. *Errors in verb tense will result in a deduction of one point for each occurrence *Additional errors such as typing errors, spelling errors, and other concerns addressed in the Adjusting to College Writing Sheets will result in deduction of one point for each occurrence * Parallelism is maintained. * Overuse of the passive voice is avoided. *See the Adjusting to College Writing Sheets in Week One. Total Possible Points Punctuation *Correct usage of apostrophes, commas, colons quotation marks, semicolons, hyphens, capitalization, underlining/italics. Appropriate punctuation of in-text citations is used. *Avoid use of comma splice, run-ons, and fragments. 15 Research Style *Papers must adhere to MLA conventions, which include in-text citations, page numbers, and title information placement. Be sure to use current MLA guidelines. These guidelines are found in the LB Handbook. *All summaries, paraphrases, and quotes are properly cited to avoid plagiarism. 10 Point Deductions *Errors will count as a 1-point deduction for each error. In the final paper, comma splices, run-on sentences, and fragments will result in a 2-point deduction each. *A minimum of 1 point will be deducted for each error in MLA format. *The paper adheres to the 1/3 to 2/3 rule for use of quotes. Research Sources 5 *Papers must meet credible source requirements of each paper. *Wikipedia is not a *Use of Wikipedia will result in an credible source. automatic 5-point deduction. *Course reading(s) is/are cited appropriately in a Works Cited page. Plagiarism *Information borrowed from a source other than *Plagiarism of any kind will result in an automatic “0” on the the student is properly assignment. cited. * Failure to submit a draft of this paper to Turnitin before submission to the dropbox for grading will result in a grade of “0”. See the syllabus policies regarding use of Turnitin. Comments: Grade_________
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