"It's time to make your verbs do the heavy lifting," I wrote in the margin of a students' draft, and I showed him some options for achieving that goal. I wouldn't offer the same suggestion to every student because those who are still floundering about for a coherent argument have bigger fish to fry, but it's very satisfying to read a draft in which the biggest challenge is encouraging a student to experiment with verbs.
Students sometimes think I'm picky about things like over-reliance on weak linking verbs, but I remind them of my now-retired colleague whose rule was "no more than three weak linking verbs per page." Try it! Cutting down on weak verbs requires paying close attention to sentence structure, a helpful exercise for any serious writer--or even the non-serious kind.
Reading student drafts requires a sort of triage, first determining the level of trauma and then determining the appropriate treatment. I have a bad habit of first reaching for papers that I suspect will be really good, which sets the bar high for the remaining papers but also assures me that the writing task was actually doable. The primary drawback of this approach is that I always end up with a group of papers requiring the most exhausting sort of intensive care.
But, as I was reminded in my Colson Whitehead class today, reading student papers is not as difficult or dangerous as pounding tunnels through solid rock or trying to harpoon a whale on the open seas, and the pay is probably better too. I'm not going to complain (much) about a task that offers me the opportunity to introduce a student to interesting verbs, even at the cost of fatigued eyes and occasional boredom.
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