I was grading a paper just now, and ugh. Okay, so it was a bad paper, not plagiarized-bad, just showing clearly that the writer didn't understand some basics, didn't read carefully, and so forth.
For some reasons, papers like this one set me off. I just come to a full stop and don't want to go on. I can read good and mediocre papers with a reasonably amiable and happy spirit. Hey, you did this well, I'll note. You could do that even better by using the text as evidence, working closely with it, blah blah blah. That's an interesting point, I'll write in the margin, could you develop it further with an example?
But a really lousy paper infuriates me, I'm ashamed to say. I can feel my heart pounding, my teeth mash together.
It's as if I take the paper as a personal affront, and really, I shouldn't. It's a paper. A piece of student work. The student did what the student did, and it's not at all about me, right?
Okay, calming now. And back to work.
This student cried in my office before when a paper earned a B-. I hope s/he understands why this paper failed. But I fear there's a painful conference ahead.