A Professor Is Wild

A professor is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He hibernates in his musty office, filled with books and wisdom, tenure applications scattered about the room. Sometimes he stays in his office for six hours before he sees a student. Outside, he stalks theses, I.S. proposals, papers and short stories, taking on more assignments then he could reasonably handle, and often dragging the work back to his home. Obedient to instinct, he covers the paper with marks and red comments, either attacking a wayward thesis or eviscerating a disordered essay structure, and he does not let up. One student refused to trash a paper so bloated with check marks and ”No!”’s that the original writing could no longer be seen. The student could in no way pry the professor’s words off his draft, and he had to walk half a mile to his advisor’s office, the paper burning with all the scarlet ink, before he could decipher what the professor had actually advised him to do.

(This is a parody of the first paragraph of "Living Like Weasels", a short essay by Annie Dillard, which was given to me by Prof. Maria Prendergast, along with an assignment to write an "in the stye of" paragraph. The full citation is this: Dillard, Annie. "Living Like Weasels". From Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, 3rd edition, edited by Robert L. Root, Jr. and Michael Steinberg. Published by Pearson Education, exact location unknown, 2005. This is a completely proper citation and if you complain I will slap you.)