“They can’t be completely different because they are the same.”  How can you argue with such perfectly circular reasoning?  This student (discussing the characters of Madeline and Judy in Hitchcock’s Vertigo) has managed to write a sentence that adds nothing to the conversation.

 

“One of the ways that a person becomes pure, in which is the punishment of a heretic, is by torturing one to confess all sins and then burning them.”  Pronoun trouble: I can become pure by burning someone else at the stake?  This comes from another paper on The Name of the Rose.  Above all, make sure your pronouns agree, and that they refer to the right antecedents.

 

“In my opinion, she felt that she was all that, that the sun rose and sat on her derriere.”  Ouch.  This comes from a paper about pop singer Madonna.  A lesson in verb agreement (or maybe just a typo – this is why you cannot trust your computer spell-checker to catch every mistake!), this sentence was submitted by a colleague from one of her students' papers.

 

"The fist character we see is Maloney.  She is obviously in the high class of society.  We see this by the way she speaks, what she wares, and her snobby attitude.  She is also the father of a rich entrepreneur."  While Melanie Daniels, heroine of Hitchcock's The Birds, may be an odd duck, this is the first viewer to speculate that she is a hermaphrodite.  At least this is better than the student who kept calling her "Phyllis" in his paper.

"To conclude, I don't believe in a mystery movie or horror movies because both movies are science fiction."  Well, I cannot argue with that logic.  Because I cannot understand it.

"I have and presently feel impaired by my personal future decisions."  Real evidence of psychic powers, submitted by a freshman English student on her final exam for a  fellow professor at the University of Tampa.  The follow-up sentence reads, "Inflicting this indecisive behavior, remains my choice of completing college away or at home."  Exactly whom is she inflicting this behavior on?

"Deep Blue Sea had sharks escape and terrorize people, like Shark Attack, but in Shark Attack, the sharks are not smart, they revert to their basic primitive functions.  So the scientist do not have to outsmart the sharks, but they still have to think like them, and predict their next movie."  I predict their next movie will be Shark Attack II.  Follow this logic: the sharks are not smart; the scientists have to think like the sharks; therefore, the scientists have to become stupid.  No wonder they all agreed to appear in this film.

"In comparing the text to the laws of nature, Frankenstein violates the religious law written in the Ten Commandments, 'Thou shalt not your brother.'"  I must have missed that lesson in Sunday School.  Which number Commandment was that?  Never mind trying to figure out what laws of nature have to do with religion anyway.

"It's almost a reverse lesbian relationship."  My head hurts just trying to picture what a reverse lesbian might look like.

"God's thing will always be unknown to man kind." And we are all grateful for that.  Of course, Zeus' thing was deployed all over ancient Greece . . .

"The best advice I could give is that sex is not essential, especially after age thirty five."  Dr. Ruth?  No, a student (from another professor's final exam) who thinks advertising Viagra is "obnoxious."  Trust me, kids, this joke is much funnier when you do hit thirty-five.  This student probably also does not approve of reverse lesbians -- or God's thing.