Teacher Rant: Stupid Mistakes

I live the majority of my life in the presence of writing. I almost always have a foot-tall stack of student papers staring at me from across the room; I have a teetering tower of books at my bedside; I belong to two writing groups; I love words. I love that my job puts me in direct contact with the expression of people's ideas and imagination. I generally give my students many chances to draft parts of their paper before the big grade comes. I am patient and I want people to do well. That's why I get really pissed when I am reading a final draft of someone's paper and I find stupid, mindless mistakes. I'm not talking about a misplaced comma or a misspelled word. I'm talking about someone who ends their paper in the middle of a sentence. I'm talking about the person who writes in 20-pt font or tries to quadruple space their paper because they didn't meet the length requirement. Do you think I'm blind? Do you think I can't look at your paper and compare them to the other eighty papers that are spaced properly? Not to mention the person who turned in a paper with three of the pages repeated, or the one who cut and pasted an entire article into the assignment. Last semester, a student thought a two minute video from Fox News would count as scholarly research and when quoting a Congresswoman, kept calling her "that girl." When I pointed out that this might be construed as being condescending, he stormed out and slammed the door. Come on. Common sense and the fact that I have functioning eyes tip me off to most people's lazy mistakes, but the fact that some think they'll sneak it by me is more than disappointing--it's insulting. My business is Words. You can assume I am paying attention.