Dear students,

I had breakfast with your T.A. this morning.

It was very casual.  I sipped my tea and sent off some emails, and she ate a bagel and dismayed over your work.

As a friend of your T.A., I must insist that from now on, you try a little bit harder on your essays—for her sake.  I mean, she had only glanced over your cover page when she sighed and noted that you had spelled your own name wrong.  The implication that your entire paper would be awful, and obviously needing any kind of edit at all, caused her to adorn her jacket and chain smoke as she forced herself through the unspellchecked mess that is your third-year thesis paper.  At this rate, she will develop lung cancer before you graduate next year.  (Or, let’s be real, three years from now—after switching majors,  living in England for a bit, and going through a phase where you decided to be a painter, despite the fact you have no artistic leanings whatsoever).

Your paper is not fooling anyone into believing you have done the required reading.  Even now as I type, your T.A. is furiously pressing red pen to paper.  She is rolling her eyes at your tired clichés and your futile attempt to work Confucius in to seem smart.  She is stunned at how many papers use the phrase “perception of human condition,” which I bet you thought you were rather clever for coming up with.

It is obvious you have used a thesaurus, or perhaps just started using words you straight up don’t understand. Cogitate? Really? Define that one for me off the top of your head. You really need to try harder, buddy.  Or, as your thesaurus would jazz that sentence up:  You categorically necessitate to compel unbreakable, chum.  That sentence is to being a real sentence as your essay is to being readable.

And finally, Wikipedia is not a source.  For god’s sake, just copy and paste its sources onto the bottom of your essay, like we do in civilized academia.

Excelsior,
Alice

PS: She just got to the part where you mix up “than” and “then.”  Expect low 60s on this one.