Unsent Pretentious Emails, Part I

I was cleaning out some old stuff in my email’s drafts folder when I realized something: I’m about two ounces of confidence away from being a total asshole. Which is right around where you want to be as far as I’m concerned.

I found this email that I wrote to an old professor of mine. I was assigned to write a ten page paper, which is normally nothing worth getting worked up about. The difference in this situation was that I was assigned to write a ten page paper with a partner, which is about zero ounces away from being full-blown retarded.

So I wrote the following email to my professor:

As of this afternoon I’ve received nearly 30 emails from students looking for partners for the media critique project. I’ve yet to respond to any them, but if I want to find someone to work with, I’ll either have to send my own spammy email blast to the entire class, or bite someone else’s bait. I’m very hesitant to do this because it is my firm belief that good writing—especially writing that’s as opinion-driven as a critique is—has a strong singular voice. There are many accomplished writing duos in the world of non-fiction and academia, but these are generally like-minded people who have spent long periods of time developing a unified and cohesive thesis, not students who met after one of them emailed their entire class to say, “yo i need a writing partner for class i don’t care what film you wanna do its whatevs to me lol.”

I’m sure this is an assignment you’ve been doing this way for a long time, and I’m sure plenty of quality papers have been produced in previous classes. Unfortunately, as someone who has been involved with far too many “group” projects, I have this bit of behind-the scenes insight to share with you: the majority of those papers were written by one person.

The first example paper you posted, for instance, contains technical errors that are consistent throughout the entire paper, suggesting that it was mostly constructed by one individual. In American English we always put commas and periods inside quotation marks, without exception. Either that paper was written by one person, or it was written by two British people. Similar examples can be found throughout the rest of the paper. For instance, both the MLA and APA style guides say to italicize film titles. Some older versions the MLA guidelines say it is okay to italicize or underline movie titles, but neither MLA or APA say it’s acceptable to put a film title in quotations, let alone put it in quotations and italicize it. This error is made consistently throughout the paper, and is one that I cannot attribute to both the authors being limey bastards.

I’m super protective of creative work that gets handed in with my name on it, and I know I’ll inevitably end up writing—or, at best, rewriting—the majority of whatever I were to work on with a partner. Since I live an 80-minute train ride away from campus, I’d really prefer to not have to deal with all the minutiae of coordinating a bunch of group work that I’d just end up doing the majority of myself. I realize that the assignment says we must have a partner, but is there any way I could bypass the BS and take sole credit for my work? Either way I’m going to be writing it on my own.

With love,

William Lawrence Disney

The email was never sent, and I ended up finding a partner. The paper sucked but we got an A anyways, because my teacher’s a big dummy.