I was going to finish a post about how people learn to be cynical in the wrong situations, but darn if this isn’t more tempting.
SO, I was going through my email, and I noticed a new comment in a Khan Academy thread from almost a year ago.
This was the question:
…and this was the new response:
This looked spammy. This looked scammy. This looked, if one was being very charitable, like one of those links one is never meant to type from memory, like the average Google search URL. This link was at the Satanic crossroads of consumer-friendly (“Awww, a nice subdomain!”) and backend-shoehorned (“/category/, I am a robot, this is WordPress outside of an optimal context.“).
I had to know more.
(Note: if any potential future employers have found this blog, this is the post where I show off my research abilities. LinkedIn tells me that “Research” (in the generic sense, presumably) is a valuable skill.)
I clicked the link, and arrived at a strange website:
Examples.Essays.Vip. Two quick thoughts on that website title:
1.Were the periods left in from the URL on purpose? If so, why not go all the way and not capitalize the words?
2.Apparantly, .vip domains exist.
The most eye-catching words below the title led me to a very strange article. Be warned: this was the part weird enough to convince me that there was something weird enough to write a whole blog post about.
Oh no.
Attempting to read this… essay-like object… is like reading a postmodern novel. Common artistic-analysis-essay clichés don’t just appear, but seem to crawl out of the giant main paragraph like worms out of rotten wood. Marvel at the formulaic transition –> quote –> citation format, with little context and rushed, nondescript interpretation. “The pale colors did the thing the critic said they did, a-a-and the other painter uses dark colors to be different, aw crap deadline, give me an A+!”
(This just in… I’m being informed that )
Speaking of context, what exactly is this essay trying to say? It’s like several excerpts from an actual essay about paintings (or, about others’ writings on paintings…), competing with each other to get a word in edgewise. Calm down, just make one point as well as you can!
Except, of course, many school essays require multiple points made, authorial ability to do so be damned.
And, of course, using this as an Example Essay (.vip) would get you docked for grammar. Few periods have the requisite spaces after them to separate the new sentence, and many courses discourage the use of “I” in papers.
Do not take this as my rant against artistic analysis or academia. Learning is important, art can and should be looked at closely, and the existence of one bizarre example essay, out of context, can convincingly argue against much of anything.
Except, of course, the likely quality of the “brilliant papers” written by Essays.Vip.
