Should I Earn a College Degree?

[SUCCESSOR]

So I have an English paper due.

Preface: For some fucking livewire idea I decided to take ENGLISH 111 this summer, which is the highest English class permitted to freshmen with high SAT, ACT, or COMPASS test scores, and somehow I qualify but...

*breath*

I SUCK AT ENGLISH! I haven't even taken an english course in like four years And not once have I passed one since I got out of middle school. Now I am smarter than the average college freshman but I lack a certain apreciation for protocol and sure as hell can't write a paper worth shit. [Not to mention high school english was more into teaching me the correct moral paradigm than how to intellegently approach and answer a thesis question(No, I don't know if I've used thesis correctly)].

Now I generally know what I don't know. And I know I suck at writing papers, And I know I will have to write one every week for the next 6 weeks, And I know this one* is due tomorrow. And all I can't think to do is rant about this and debate about looking at porn in a public lab because I need something to clear mmy mind.

*Should I Earn a College Degree?
Recomended 3-5 pages
Min. 5 sources
Due 11:30 tommorrow

[AtmaWeapon]

You are still in the "I need to take college seriously or else I'm going to fail and dishonor my ancestors" phase. You'll get out of it after a few classes.

Now, to be honest, my AP credit was sufficient to auto-pass me through the 6 hours of English credits I needed, but everything I did in high school English was literature interpretation, not grammar.

Based upon your posting style you already have what it takes to make a passing grade; just don't use contractions and use a spellcheck (you misspelled 2 words in the post). A 3-5 page essay is pretty standard and depending on the protocols your professor put on you (My CS professors always wanted 12 point Times New Roman double-spaced) the difficulty of filling that space ranges somewhere between "I can IM my friends while doing this" and "eh I better close IM".

The best suggestion I can make though is to structure your essay in a way that it is likely most other student's won't. The C and below students are going to choose affirmative or negative and discuss only that. Odds are they are going to end up using the same sources and practically every essay will be the same. What you want to do is discuss both reasons why you should get a college degree and reasons why you shouldn't get a college degree, then devote the rest of the paper to which one you think is the best choice and why.

Really the problem with the essay is the ridiculous number of sources required; 5 sources for such a short essay is pretty nasty but if you divide them up and choose them well it should be doable.

[cbailey78]

I agree! Having you to write essays can be very stressful and very frustrating. You end up running out of ideas of what to write in an essay and then you have nothing but to cheat yourself scouring through the net stealing ideas and copy and paste paragraphs. What's funny is that when you're assigned to do a lot of given number of pages, you end up wanting to put a lot of page breaks just to increase a number of pages.

Here is an advise for you. When you are assign to write papers, the first thing to do is to take your time and do plenty of brainstorming. Then make an outline for a map of your essay and start a rough draft. Once your done with your draft, take your time editing your paper and have your friends and your classmates check it for you and put correction marks to see what needs to be corrected and do your next draft and so on till you have the feeling it's all neat and ready to be turned in.

I think you should earn a college degree. It will make you feel very good and proud of yourself and you will increase your chance in succeeding your life and your future!

I wish you the BEST of luck of your assignments! *Hugs*:heart:

[SUCCESSOR]

Actually I am in no such phase. The phase I'm in right now is "I have to pass this class because dropping it would mean losing my financial aid thus making college nigh impossible."

well besides counter the content of some of your posts I need help. I need a source in opposition. I had one that I found easily in a google search but can't remember the words I used. any help is greatly appreciated

[AtmaWeapon]

I'm pretty sure there are lots of greats (I think Bill Gates was one of them) who dropped out of college/never went.

You may not know this but Beldaran has recently outed me as an irrational follower of magical arts. I consulted the Oracle Who Has One Hundred Zeroes with the coded phrase "successful people without college degrees" and, in her Ten-to-the-Hundredth Wisdom, she revealed several useful results.

[SUCCESSOR]

My rough draft that took me about a whopping 3 hours(2 1/2).

Let me know how you feel about it.

[AtmaWeapon]

This may be too late but I will give some pointers. There are a few spelling and grammar problems, and a few sentences that I think need better style.

The last sentence of the second paragraph needs a period.

There is an inconsistency in paragraph spacing; Paragraphs one, two, and three have an extra line between them, but paragraphs three, four, and five have no space (unless I misinterpret a fourth paragraph; in that case there is only one missing extra line). Word can take care of this for you if you highlight everything (CTRL + A), choose Format > Paragraph..., and in the "Spacing" area choose your font size in the "After" field. From that point on, every time you hit Enter you will be in a new paragraph with extra space automatically added. (This is a picky Word usage thing but technically the only time you should ever hit Enter is to start a new paragraph; styles should be used for formatting.)

Some spelling errors got past the spellchecker:

17% more that someone

my up bringing that("upbringing" is one word)

High School Diplomashould not be capitalized.

(Karlgaard, R. “Is College Worth It.” 2006)This citation has no trailing period.

This sentence:

Earning a college degree has been a natural decision since I can rememberis pretty poor grammar due to the "since I can remember" part which is not formed well; a better structure would be "For my entire life, I never questioned whether I should earn a college degree." or something along that line.

This reads kind of awkward:

I hold tight to the belief that it is what I want and should doand should be rephrased to something more like "I continue to believe that the correct choice is to obtain a college degree."


The average student spends 5.2 years to earn a bachelor degree and costs average $60,000 at a public university. Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, William Faulkner, Quentin Tarentino, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and John D. Rockefeller all found great success without a college degreeDepending on how strict your teacher is, these statements could use a citation.

Your second paragraph's font changes; when you pasted the quote it took the style of wherever you copied it from so you will want to fix that.

On page 2:

earn an associates degree thandouble-check to make sure "associates" should not be "associate's"; I'm not quite certain but I believe it is supposed to be possessive. I'm more certain of this because:
The value of a bachelors degree has been on the rise was tagged as incorrect by my version of Word; it suggested "bachelor's". Also, you are inconsistent with capitalization of "bachelor's"; it should always be lowercase (associate's as well, but I didn't catch any inconsistencies in that). This is correct according to this page (http://www.wsu.edu/identity/editorial-style/capitalization.html).


The value of a degree is still high, but without adaptability, ambition, and expertise it can still lead to a low-end career.This is an awesome final sentence for this essay. I don't think you have enough on that third page to make it count; perhaps if you could flesh out your previous paragraphs with a few more sentences to support this concluding sentence you could make 5-8 more lines out of it and a more convincing argument for a length of 3 pages.

Grammar check warns me of passive voice in several sentences but I have an embarrassing disclosure to make: I have never fully understood what the devil passive voice is but somehow managed to train myself to never use passive voice in my essays, or my teachers were too lazy to spot it when I did use passive voice.

Other than some style and rough-draft errors I believe the paper is good for the topic and requirements. "Opinion" type essays are always tough to write because it seems to me most of the formal writing style rules prevent structures that are required for opinion essays that don't sound pretentious. The points are clear and the conclusion is on the money, I just think the essay needs a few more sentences driving home the point that a person's motivation is more important than the papers they carry.

[erm2003]

Regular Past Tense: David planned the party.

Passive Voice: The party was planned by David.

The emphasis in the passive voice is on the event or thing, not the person. I am sure there is a better explanation but this is what I think of when I try to explain the passive voice. The only reason why I even know this is when I learned how to form these sentences in my high school Spanish class.

[SUCCESSOR]

Thank for the help. I turned it in today and so after realized I could have turned it in thursday. what'ya gonna do.

But I have a new paper to do on a topic (my choice) of reasoned judgement with 7 sources(was ten) due in a week. yay!

[DarkDragon]

Regular Past Tense: David planned the party.

Passive Voice: The party was planned by David.

The emphasis in the passive voice is on the event or thing, not the person. I am sure there is a better explanation but this is what I think of when I try to explain the passive voice. The only reason why I even know this is when I learned how to form these sentences in my high school Spanish class.

Pretty much.

There's nothing at all grammatically wrong with the passive voice, but some people object to it on grounds of style.
The passive is frequently used when including the "natural" subject of the sentence is impossible ("Jesus was born a Jew..."), irrelevant ("President Bush was elected in 2000..."), or undesirable ("Errors have been made...").

It is also often used in law, science, or other technical writing to avoid the first person and give the work a more impersonal tone: "The beaker was heated at 400 Kelvin..."

Overusing the passive voice can make your writing cold, stilted, or inefficient, which is possibly why Microsoft highlights it as an error. As long as you're aware of the alternatives, and mix up your sentence structures, I wouldn't worry too much about it, though.