Ruby Granger #26 Ruby Granger is a bad writer

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xoxoxo13

you must have amazing eyesight because I can't even read the title lol
 
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Griftwood

This is the introduction and the document is titled "Final version before PDF" so this is in fact something she's submitting

xoxoxo13 said:
you must have amazing eyesight because I can't even read the title lol
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sorry, Tattle got rid of most of the pixels in my original screenshot, I promise it's a lot clearer on the video! It's around 2:20-2:23 in her "Deadline Season Study Day" video from yesterday.
 
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Brightside


As someone who has literally just submitted three critical essays I know for a fact that they're not supposed to have headings, headings are commonly used in bigger pieces of work like a dissertation. Since this is the introduction of her essay, retelling and summarising is fine at this point but she shouldn't be doing it in the rest of her essay as that's where she should be analysing and close reading the text she has chosen to write about.
 
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missmina

Does she even exercise nowadays? I thought she's too busy writing her tHeSiS.

Also personally I don't see anything wrong with her dad taking her swimming - it's a really enjoyable activity and I still do it a bunch with friends as a way of socialising. Doesn't have to be intense either and at least with its time limitation and her dad being there it could be quite beneficial to her.
 
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influencersmakemewannadie

"Despite from being"....yikes. At least she managed to get the author's name right in the essay, even if she repeatedly got it wrong in the video.
 
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Ilaariaa

influencersmakemewannadie said:
"Despite from being"....yikes. At least she managed to get the author's name right in the essay, even if she repeatedly got it wrong in the video.
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Had this been for an ESL course, even a non-advanced one, she'd have lost points for that. Makes me feel better about my English to be honest to see a native speaker and aspiring writer make this kind of mistakes.
 
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Red Wings

Holy mother of waffling, this essay is incredibly inefficient at getting to a basic point that Lemony Snicket is a didactic narrator, but also diverges from it in key, and still unknown as of yet, ways. There are so many filler words "gloomy and ominous" could just be "ominous", or better yet, "foreboding" likely covers what Rubius was trying to convey with both words. It's also like she doesn't know what pronouns are? She wrote "The Bad Beginning" and "narrator" so many times and with sentence restructuring it could have easily been "that/it" and "he" and cut down on words and repetitive phrasing. The sentence describing the plot of the book is a serious run-on and should have been cut in two. It would have read better and been easier to understand.

Also, this might be a regional thing, but across the pond in the US, we were told to never use parentheses unless it's a translation of a foreign word, a citation, or something else I don't remember. The reasoning being that commas suffice and that it's used as a lazy way to pack in aside information that doesn't have bearing to the main thesis. While I think this is mostly BS, I'm surprised that Rubidium has gotten away with it for so long and not been penalized. Especially since whatever writing I've seen of hers, whatever was in the parentheses was totally irrelevant. In my high school, this wouldn't have gotten higher than a C. How is this acceptable in a university?

Also Rubelite, I'd like to point out that I'm an engineering major. Yep, the major notorious for having poor communication skills and a loose grasp on English. I haven't taken a humanities course in several years, but I can still easily find problems with your writing as a 4th year English student. I think that's a fucking problem, don't you?
 
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Scapier88

And just like that Ruby's academic years are over.
Now what will she do for 27hrs aday now she can't study
 
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dodadedo

I think in British English, parenthesis using brackets is valid. We consider parenthesis as being through brackets, commas and dashes, rather than just brackets, as being pretty similar. It's a tonal/register difference, but grammatically it's usually fine.

I went to her video and paused it so I could read. HOW is that an essay by a final year English Literature student, currently sitting on a First? HOW.
 
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figgypud

Yeah, I thought so. In my essays (I'm still in second year and a distance learner so possibly things are different at Exeter/in final year) headings would not fly.

Also, I think her introduction seems a bit basic? It may be a longer essay so a longer intro which gives her the room to expand, but in no circumstances would I be recounting the plot like she is there. The introduction is, in my experience at least, for introducing the points you're going to cover. Perhaps it's just her wording.

For example: "The author, Lemony Snicket, is a pseudonym used by Daniel Handler. Handler uses Snicket in order to participate in the same world that the Baudelaires inhabit."

They're just two statements, she doesn't really link them or make a point. Instead she could write: "Handler's use of the fictional author Snicket allows him to to participate and exist within the fictional narrative to further the sense of immersion and authorial authority."

Or whatever her point is, I don't know, I haven't read A Series of Unfortunate Events, but she needs to indicate where her statements lead to explore them later in the essay. Her level of writing, if that's the final hand-in, is a lot more basic than I'd have thought. I know a lot of tutors in essay subjects such as English have different expectations in regards to structure, what an introduction and conclusion should look like, so maybe my experience is just of one preference but her introduction is more what I'd write if I was writing a book review rather than a critical essay.

Similarly she says: "This is the opening line...." and then starts the next sentence "These opening lines..." when she could make it into one point, there's no real continuation or cohesiveness of an idea, such as "This is the opening line of the first novel in A Series of Unfortunate Events, setting up the readers' expectations for the series....".

It's very thorough, saying it's a series for children with thirteen books and this is the first, but if she's not making a specific point about there being thirteen books, it doesn't need to be there. Of course I'm not expecting any especial analysis in the introduction but she should be indicating what she will be analysing and exploring, surely? From those first couple of paragraphs, all we know is that the essay is about A Series of Unfortunate Events.
 
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dodadedo

Ruby Granger #27: despite from being, dead flies seeing, cereal a-peaing
 
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gossip_guy

It's not hard to see why she's constantly going well over the word count if she's including a shoddily written high school book report as the intro to every essay. It took her an entire page to say practically nothing.



One of the tabs she had open was for this:


Looks like she's been searching for synopses to read so she can skip reading the books again.
 
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influencersmakemewannadie

gossip_guy said:
It's not hard to see why she's constantly going well over the word count if she's including a shoddily written high school book report as the intro to every essay. It took her an entire page to say practically nothing.
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This is exactly what I was thinking! For a longer essay or dissertation, fair enough. But didn't she say before that this essay was 2/2.5k or something? I wouldn't want to be wasting precious words on over a page of introduction, let alone titles for each section which add to the word count. Get your main points across and get straight into the analysis instead of this pointless time-wasting waffle.
 
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yerdasellsavon

Just to offer some insight, I study at Exeter and the use of headings is generally encouraged for essays, regardless of length. Bear in mind, I study law and appreciate that isn't exactly the same as English, but headings are encouraged for stylistic purposes and to help with clarity. Most legal journal articles are laid out in this fashion too.

That doesn't mean it's not right for English of course and the headings make little difference to how generally incomprehensible that introduction is. She's gone with the approach of overcomplexity just to sound clever, which is so detectable and doesn't work.
 
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Ilaariaa

I think her writing style is clunky, repetitive, and inelegant. My advisor's number one tip for writing my thesis in English was to avoid long and convoluted sentences with too many subordinate clauses, and I think that's what happened here. I don't know about you but for me, some of her sentences are hard to read and comprehend because they're too long.
 
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teflonpanda

Honestly, if I had read that excerpt without knowing it's written by Ruby, I would have thought "okay, this is clearly written by an undergrad student who has not yet learnt that revising is important. It's not bad by any means, and they've clearly understood the basics of how to set up an essay introduction. In terms of content it's decent, but you can tell they didn't revise it cause the writing a bit clumsy. Some sentences are too long and unclear, and there's even a few outright glaring errors that even a superficial revision would have caught (looking at you, "despite of"). While this is not exactly a super gifted student, they're also not a hopeless case, they just need to put some more time and care into revising/rewriting that."

However, since I know this was written by Ruby Granger, self-proclaimed perfectionist and English language connoisseur, who claims to write up to seven (7!) drafts of her assignments before handing them in, all I can say is... oh boy. xD
 
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J

Just here to say

She's a parody of herself

I dread to think people wasted their money in the "book" she published.

The art of writing is that of writing concisely while conveying a clear point in an innovative way. I.e. Making the reader look/feel at/about something in a different way. I feel bad for her because she clearly learnt nothing during the 4 years at uni and wasted her time.
 
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Griftwood

This is the paper that was supposed to be 2,000 words and she was over the word count by 2,000 words. Can you imagine what she’s cut if the finished product looks like this
 
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