Except for Opal’s, that first batch of essays was depressingly dismal. Their authors weren’t stupid—the classroom discussions had proved that much—but the writing was breathtakingly incoherent. All their academic lives they’d been cutting and pasting from the Internet—a phrase here, a sentence there—a pastiche of observations linked by little more than general subject matter. Individual sentences, lifted from their original context and plopped down in a foreign one, varied wildly in tone and style. Given a list of transitional phrases—but, rather, on the other hand, while, hence—the essays’
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