"Time that with this strange excuse..."

Edmund Spenser

Painter not Identified

(Image from Wikipedia)

One of the little ironies of teaching is that the bad students get all the good help.

I spend half an hour or more, even up to an hour on long papers, making corrections and writing comments on error-ridden student essays. As you might imagine, this can grow rather tedious rather quickly, and I've now been marking final essays for the past two weeks solid.

Thus with joy do I greet the occasional student essay that needs few markings but mostly an appreciative reading, such as one on "Edmund Spenser and Archaism" that introduces its topic as follows:

A poet's poet, known otherwise as "the prince of poets", Edmund Spenser lived in Elizabethan England [Britain] from 1552 to 1599. He wasn't born to all the privileges, but to a modest family in London. He received a decent education in Cambridge and was influenced by Richard Mulcaster the humanist and Gabriel Harvey, with whom he shared great interest in theories of poetry and quantitative versification in English. Spenser set out on his career by serving as personal secretary and aide to Dr. John Young, and later Lord Grey of Wilton. During his services, he got to know some important and powerful poets like Sir Philip Sydney, Sir Edward Dyer, and Sir
Walter Ralegh. One noticeable [notable?] thing about Spenser is that unlike these poets, he intentionally tried to be the great English poet of his age, and his principal interest was not in court, churches, or states. He began his work as a poet by translating some poems. His first major publication of his own poetry was The Shepheardes Calender in 1579. His well-known poems are The Faerie Queene, Amoretti, Epithalamion, and Prothalamion. In his works, he used a language that did not quite belong to his own time. Although Edmund Spenser pursued 'archaism' by copying some actual lines and language of Chaucer, he was more than a mere imitator because he not only reproduced what seemed like an archaic spelling to his contemporaries but also created his own unique archaic diction and became one of the most influential figures in English literature, inspiring many poets, including Milton.

As you see from the occasional red font, I've made a few corrections and suggestions. I even considered repositioning the comma in

"the prince of poets", Edmund Spenser

from after to before the quotation marks, but since this student spent some years abroad in England, I'll indulge her British punctuation and pardon her for writing well.

As you can see, this Korean student writes well, better than most native speakers of English. By this, I mean that she not only writes fluent and nearly flawless English but that she has a writer's sense for supplying details that answer a reader's inchoate questions even before the question is asked. A poor writer might remark that Spenser was "influenced by Richard Mulcaster," leaving it at that and us to ask, "Who's Richard Mulcaster?" But a good writer, like our student above, would add to "influenced by Richard Mulcaster" an identifying detail, such as "the humanist." Most of my students, both in Korea and over the years and lands, wouldn't add any designation at all, leaving poor Mr. Mulcaster a cipher.

Richard Mulcaster, incidentally, was one of 16th-century England's humanists and educational reformers, best known for his work devising a rigorous curricula for teaching Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and for his writings on humanist education.