David Foster Wallace's Syllabus
/Katie Roiphe of Slate.com has an article about David Foster Wallace’s extraordinary syllabus:
If you are used to whipping off papers the night before they’re due, running them quickly through the computer’s Spellchecker, handing them in full of high-school errors and sentences that make no sense and having the professor accept them ‘because the ideas are good’ or something, please be informed that I draw no distinction between the quality of one’s ideas and the quality of those ideas’ verbal expression, and I will not accept sloppy, rough-draftish, or semiliterate college writing. Again, I am absolutely not kidding.
Syllabuses have always intrigued me because of how revealing they can be. Although, I usually found professors to be much scarier in their syllabuses than they were in person. English professors, anyway.