It's hard to write a good paper about a bad topic. That's why ... - English

(This in-class assignment can be used for individual work, group work, or whole-class discussion. The
point is to present students with sample passages that have a variety of errors that they can attempt to
correct. This not only emphasizes documentation techniques, but offers students a chance to become even
more comfortable using the guide to troubleshoot.)
Rules for Writers Worksheet Rhetoric 105
1) In “The Crown,” a 1915 metafictional essay that complements the philosophies
explored in Women in Love, Lawrence writes, “He who triumphs, wins.” (262).
2) As John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman rightly claim, the “rigid mold”
established by Hongwu at the onset of the Ming era left “the Ming
administration…eventually unable to adjust…to China’s changing needs”
(Fairbank and Goldman 133).
3) Discussing the development of America’s middle class, Stewart Ewen offers a
corollary that can help us clarify the nature of liberal education, he claims that as
the American middle-class developed the production of lower-quality replicas of
high-quality goods comprised the formation of new “cultural wages” (191).
4) Laurence Pringle notes that the hatcheries in which female chickens are housed
while they produce eggs leave only enough room for each chicken to eat, drink,
defecate, and lay eggs.
5) In The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespearean History Play, critic Manheim
writes, “The incompatibility between man and job appears most clearly and
emphatically in Richard II” (57).
6) In 1928, Hines and Armstrong collaborated on revolutionary recordings that,
“have had a lasting influence on jazz piano” (Pareles 32).
7) Although the town and the country are often pitted against each other in literary
and artistic representations, Mr. Williams notes with irony that “directly or
indirectly most towns seem to have developed as an aspect of the agricultural
order itself” (48).
8) The novel “News From Nowhere” exhibits William Morris’ own
conceptualization of utopia.
9) Since the Middle Ages Norwich has been among the most important cities in
England; in fact, until the early-eighteenth century, Norwich was England’s
second largest city, surpassed only by London (Daiches, Flower 172).
10) Rather than encouraging his readers to improve society, Emerson dismisses
society as a hopeless concept. In “Self-Reliance” he writes,
“Society never advances. It recedes as fast as one side as it gains on the
other. It under undergoes continual change: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it