Utter Waste of Time

Have you ever wondered how much time we actually spend in writing out our essay that is actually our essay? Not much actually. Instead, most of the time is spent on formatting the essay, choosing the right font and and the correct font size, another major portion of the time is spent on doing up footnotes and writing the bibliography, which are the most tedious things in the essay.

But what is downright ridiculous is that there is a 'correct' format in doing up the footnotes, and the bibliography. And they are both different. I spent like one whole afternoon doing my footnotes and bibliography for this essay because my prof criticised my previous essay for having the wrong footnoting style. Which is utter crap! For four years, I've been doing my footnoting and never once has anybody said it's wrong. The only time which came close was when Farrell marked dots and circled them after every one of my footnotes. I forgot that I needed to put a fullstop in there.

A couple of my other friends also kena that wrong footnoting criticism by that same said prof. So to play it safe, I went to ask another friend (not doing that module, but who did a module under said prof some other semesters ago and learnt the correct way of footnoting directly under that same said prof) about what is the correct way of footnoting. But looking at the way he wrote his bibliography, I saw immediately that it was wrong wrong wrong. For every period that should have been, he used a comma instead.

So why can said prof use and teach a wrong bibliography but criticise on our correct footnoting? Double standards...

Anyway, let's get straight into the point of why must we footnote. It's basically because we need to acknowledge the author about it, isn't it? So does it really matter what format we use? I don't think so. But one of my profs (not the earlier mentioned one) explained that it's also to make publishers happy. Well, then so be it. As long as we know the key essence in footnoting and bibliographing, then everything should be all right, so why should we still waste tons of time making sure something is correct?

This is why I prefer writing exams than writing term papers. There isn't a need for footnoting and bibliographing in exams. And this is also why I think anal profs really have too much time on their hands.

A couple of my friends and I are extremely unhappy with a particular prof. First he took too much time to grade our papers, only for us to find out that our papers were badly graded. Not because we received bad grades for it (we did), but more because we didn't believe we deserved the grades we received.

Okay, for me, on the grounds that my argument was badly expressed and deserved that grade I got, I accept, but that was not the case. Out of all the comments that I received, there's only one which was valid, all the other were really crap comments which were just being plain anal and contradictory. I'm really starting to wonder if this said prof is indeed as credible as his reputation or that we're just at the wrong end of the spectrum on a wrong day of the wrong side of his books.

Anyway, I'm really glad I decided not to do an ISM, and even gladder that I didn't ask him to be my supervisor. wtf...