Post Scriptum

Marking student proposals for the short story class, I came across the following. Asked to explain the value of a critical source to the student's argument, the student wrote, "By selecting this work as a critical source, it takes much of the tedious work out of finding useful quotations out of the text itself away."

Yes, indeed, that's why we use critics: that way we don't have to bother our pretty heads with finding quotations in the literature itself; we can just use the quotations the critic pulled out as useful to his or her argument. Because, after all, it is incredibly tedious, just utterly beyond boring, to review a story to find evidence to support one's own point....