Term
papers: The Hidden Health Threat
By Typewriter Monkey <esperlydia@yahoo.com>
Ah, the term paper. If memory serves me right, the term paper
has been a part of the college experience for well over a decade. Why, the mere mention of a term paper can dramatically
change the mood in a room, not to mention cause several trees to look around in
panic. From first-year students at
Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to students in the “real” world,
everybody who sets foot in a hallowed hall of learning has written a paper,
paid someone to write one for them, or downloaded a copy of one and passed it
off as their own. Instructors tend to
see term papers as good clean fun, a chance to gauge what the student has learned
without going through the bother of asking them questions. Yes, term papers are very useful. But are they healthy for our students? Could they be, in fact, dangerous?
In short, term papers cause undue
stress, kill trees, alter sleep patterns, can be linked to several medical
problems, and keep people indoors staring at a computer screen, when they could
be outside, in the fresh smog, dodging bullets and getting eaten by wild
dogs. They take time to write, time
that can be spent doing things that people enjoy doing, like: playing video
games, downloading porn, doing crack, drinking carbonated soda, and sweeping up
mouse droppings containing the Deadly Hanta Virus™. This author shall attempt to prove this point while
simultaneously doing as little work as possible. After all, this author is a college student.
Consider the facts. Then consider this: Average College Student
graduated from Average High School, where the most challenging thing they ever
had to do was occasionally forge their parents name and skip class, avoiding
the wild dogs on their way to the mall or bordello. College, while at first deceptively similar, is far more
complicated. The classes may still be
pointless, but the instructors expect you to learn something, and to repeat it
back with a minimal re-use of words.
This can be hard for your typical desk jockeys. To suddenly have to pay attention, and to
combine strings of words into something that makes sense to somebody they do
not know is a lot to handle to someone who has never had to use their brain for
more than the storage of song lyrics and gossip before.
Term papers can cause stress even with
experienced wordsmiths. In a recent and
highly detailed survey consisting of asking the person next to the author while
she was working out, 100% of the respondents said that term papers were nothing
but stress. The numbers speak for
themselves. They say, “Leave us out of
this! Write your own paper!” (One cannot help but wonder, at this point,
if the author is slightly out of her gourd at the moment. The answer is when is she not?)
Term papers are usually long, requiring
the student spend several hours of their time in front of a computer, which
many believe is not a good place to be.
The light from the computer screen weakens a person’s eyes and messes up
the sleep cycle, telling your brain it is still daytime even when the clock
reads midnight. The constant typing and
retyping of the same information causes Repetitive Stress Syndrome, which leads
to Carpal Tunnel and turns left at Metatarsal Overpass. The music the students
play in the background really bothers the neighbors, who call the police again,
causing them to break down the door when the student fails to hear and open the
door in time. The subsequent jail time
and court hearings often cause the term paper to be late, adding further stress
by knocking down the grade several points, all the way to A-minus on
occasion.
As if that was not bad enough, the
contents of a paper itself pose a dire threat.
There are thousands of letters in any given paper, which combine to form
words and sentences at an alarming rate.
Soon our world will be overrun by refugee letters and words who have gone
rogue, broken free of their slavery to the page, and joined up with the wild
dogs. Perhaps they are out for revenge
after being printed in a paper on the glory of cheese or something equally
inane. If the author were a letter, she
would be annoyed too. Just how glorious
can cheese be?
So it is clear term papers are bad for your
health. They hurt you at every
opportunity, they get you arrested, and are conspiring for your ruin behind
your back. Perhaps this could all be
forgiven if, like their celebrity counterpart “The Review”, they were
entertaining and informative somehow.
Sadly, term papers often fall short of the mark. They are usually of
subjects that are dull even when legitimate experts write about them, and their
authors, almost without fail, are writing with only a grade in mind, and not
the entertainment of an audience or even themselves.
Still, the constant typing and
re-typing of term papers does serve one purpose. It prepares a lot of people for careers in government and bureaucracy,
where nobody cares what exactly is said, as long as it fills the appropriate
number of pages and doesn’t have any complicated words in it, such as “is.”
I weep for humanity.
(Sorry. ‘The author’ weeps for humanity.
Who was it that started the tradition that authors could not refer to
themselves in the first person during a scholarly work? Was it, perhaps, too informal for professional
use? Maybe people had trouble accepting
something as fact if they felt they actually knew the person who was saying it,
instead of a friend of a friend of a guy they used to know in grade school. All this author knows is that it makes writing
even more of a chore than she has been claiming it is.)
Term papers are evil. This has been
clearly documented. They produce
nothing but waste, murdering thousands of poor helpless trees to supply the
incessant need for paper to print them on. They may be usual punishment, but
they are cruel, and should be banned by the Geneva Convention, along with
biological weapons and Adam Sandler.
What evil the world must have done to deserve him this author will never
know.
In conclusion, the author would like
to state that this paper has more than likely been nothing more than a waste of
both your time and her own. She
apologizes for any inconvenience. If
you are not fully satisfied with this term paper, please return unused portion
for a full refund. And remember, wild
dogs are--- Wait a minute, who left the back door open? AAH!
The wild dogs have gotten inside!
Oh No! FLUFFY! My poor cat! All right, take that you Bas--
Bibliography
It's a pun.
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