I’m in this terrible writing class. While it’s certainly not the worst class I’ve ever taken, it’s by far the stupidest. Nevermind the fact that we haven’t been taught a single thing, unless you count “your stories must be super-saturated with elaborate ‘sensory details’” as learning something. It seems every person in the class, save for a select few individuals, has some kind of mentally retarding disease.

For the past several weeks we’ve been critiquing our fellow classmates’ work. We each exchanged copies of each other’s manuscripts so that each day we can arrange ourselves in the “circle of love” and critique three other students’ stories for two hours. Joy. Of course, most of said stories are pretty bland. A select few are gut-wrenchingly awful. The few good pieces are destroyed either by a class who does not understand them or an author’s comments on their own work, as they explain in excruciating detail why their piece is the most symbolic thing ever written.

Yesterday my short story was critiqued. It was a piece of crap, I have no delusions about that. Don’t worry though, I’ll be sure to upload it here, glorifying it as a new article, just as soon as I can find a teaser image to go with it. Its craptitude wasn’t enough to prevent me from getting an A on it, an especially impressive feat considering many of my classmates got Cs on their stories, and with good reason. Still, the real joy came yesterday. The in-class critique itself was interesting, if completely unhelpful. Comments ranged from “I liked the details” to “I didn’t understand what was going on.” In short, the exact same comments every other short story has received.

As part of this critiquing assignment, we’re made to “mark up” our fellow students’ manuscripts, underlining segments we liked, suggesting how to improve the piece, and correcting any grammatical errors which may be present. It’s all pretty standard fare. After class yesterday, I got a chance to read over my marked up manuscripts and found the comments exceedingly entertaining. I’m sure dorkclub.com’s readership doesn’t consists of the smartest people on Earth. Hell, I read it and account for more than 20% of our daily hits. However, I’m sure when I use the phrase “the only object on my person,” you’re all more than capable of understanding what I’m saying. It is English, after all. Apparently it’s too much for college-level English students. Of the twenty-three manuscripts returned to me, eighteen had that phrase circled, underlined, or otherwise marked with some sort of comment dictating the reader was unable to understand it. The best comment was “handcuffs?,” (OMFG punctuation nightmare) if only because there were no handcuffs in the entire piece.

Still better, was several people’s tendency to confuse the first person narrator with me. It’s a fiction class, team, despite some students’ failure to realize so. No, I never murdered anybody. Neither did my father. Also, I’ve never found any dead eight-year-old girls in the woods, despite the fact that some of you thought so.

The best part is, my “unique thing about me” which I presented to the class on the first day of class was that I ran my own website – dorkclub.com. Hopefully some of them are reading right now.