Dear General Psychology Students:
I don't usually rant publically about errors made on assignments, but after grading over 100 of your Course Papers, I think this warrants a word or two.
I was taken aback by the large percentage of you who wrote just over 4 pages, and simply stopped. I'm not sure what the psychology is there, but it's infuriatingly mysterious. If given an assignment and asked to write 5 pages, why would one write only 4? Or 4 and one paragraph, as many of you did? Did you think that, so long as you'd typed a few words on the fifth page, I'd count that as 5 pages? It also makes me wonder what the outcome would have been if I'd assigned a 6 page paper. Would you have written 5? Or 5 1/2?
Keep in mind that, unless instructed otherwise, page limits are commands, not suggestions. Although it's certainly true that, given our workload, college professors would prefer that you stay within the limits assigned, it is still a matter of respect that you write UP TO the page limits we set.
I am also astonished that so many of you passed high school English with apparently no idea of how to use commas. Punctuation (especially commas) can drastically change, or even reverse, the meaning in a sentence. Some of the papers I graded had commas missing or included in such a haphazard way as to suggest that the writer was simply guessing at where they were needed, and almost none were void of such errors entirely.
Consider the following comma issue. If you are a Protestant, Luke 23:43 has Jesus saying to a thief, “Verily, I say to you, this day you shall be with me in Paradise.” But since Catholics believe that the thief needed to spend time in Pergutory (and, being perfect, Jesus would go straight to Heaven), they punctuate it this way, "Verily, I say to you this day, you shall be with me in Paradise.” Quite a change in meaning, all with the movement of a comma!