While Bob was awake, Sue dreamed. She dreamed the vivid, insane dreams of someone whose body cannot decide whether to give up on life just yet, or carry on long enough to give a baby a fighting chance.
She dreamed of teaching her class.
"I want to talk to you about your most recent essays, before I return them to you. At first I was impressed with the apparent bulk of writing. I wondered if some of you had not genuinely learnt to be more creative than 'On my vacation we went to the beach, the end.'"
The students, who had been quite normal as she began that sentence, were gradually evolving into something else before her eyes. She could not quite tell what, but she was determined to finish her thoughts before they became squids and swam away, or dissolved in flames, or flew south for the... wait, were they turning into ducks?
Was she?
"Quack. Quack quack."
Sue concentrated a little harder, although the essays were by now tucked under a wing rather than held in her hand.
"By that I mean, quack, I did have high hopes. But, quack, those hopes were rudely dashed. Don't peck while I am talking to you, Bill Duckworth!"
The unusual shock of Sue losing her cool appeared to settle the children back into a more human form, at least for the moment. "Right, to get to the point, and not beat around the bush, it seems that the only way many of you reached an acceptable number of words in this particular essay was by means of unnecessary puffery."
"You mean we used a lot of words without them much advancing the plot, Miss?"
"Yes, exactly. That is correct. Quite so. It is poor technique to simply run up your word count without the text actually going anywhere useful. And each and every one of you... stop turning into a fish, Paul Salmon, or I shall send you home breadcrumbed and fried!"
"Yes Miss. Sorry Miss."
"So I want to mention some ways you used to merely expand the length of these essays without making a meaningful contribution to the content. Firstly, repetition."
"Saying the same thing over and over again, Miss?"
"Precisely. Saying the same thing over and over again. That is poor technique. If you say the same thing over and over again in future, I shall strike out the repetitive parts and count only the original words. Is that clear?"
"Yes Miss. Sorry Miss."
Several of the more ashamed beetles crawled towards the back of the room.
"Another thing that several of you did, other than repetitively saying the same thing over and over again, was to have the characters recite something at length which someone else already wrote. Case in point, Terry Daniher -- and you can stop turning into a moose right now -- you had someone recite a lengthy passage originally written by John Wyndham."
She handed him the essay. "Would you care to read the relevant passage so we all get the idea?"
Terry uncomfortably shifted his horns, and began. "Edward sat down with his book, and began to read. This is what he read. 'When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere. I felt that from the moment I woke. And yet, when I started functioning a little more smartly, I became doubtful. After all, the odds were that it was I who was wrong, and not everyone else--'"
"That will do, Terry. I think we've heard quite enough of someone else's work for today. But it gets worse. Jane, would you care to read from your essay, starting where I put a large, angry, red X?"
"So this was it. The World Championship of Pi Digit Recital. Augustus knew he could win. He waited six and a half hours for his turn, for he was to compete second. Then he began. 'Three point one four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven nine three two three eight four six two six four three three eight three two seven nine five zero two eight eight four one nine seven one six nine three nine nine three seven five one zero five eight two zero nine seven--'"
"Thank you, Jane. That will do. Jane, are you alright? You look a funny color."
For that matter, Sue could not remember a Jane in her class at all.
And the walls began to glow, an eerie green.
--
Would Sue wake up?
Would Sue wake up sane??
Is a dream sequence the very worst way to run up the word count???
These questions, and one inscribed in code and carried on gold plates by the Pioneer spacecraft, will be answered in the next excruciating portion of... CLIFFHANGER.
Posted by David at November 16, 2003 11:48 AM