So I was having a really nice morning nap (actually not so nice. I dreamt that I got caught for speeding) when my officer woke me up to tell me the "good news" that I was to be emcee for this prize giving ceremony the department is organising. It's for some essay writing competition lar. Anyway it's bad because 1) I hate public speaking, script or no script, and 2) I hate public speaking in front of the Chief of Army. Seriously, they actually trust me not to make some retarded joke about the Chief while I'm onstage?

The silver lining in this is that I managed to bargain my way to an extra day off. So at least now I can go for the youth leaders' retreat full time. But I dunno. Screw things up and I sign extra duties instead of getting a day off.

So anyway we had to read through the winning entries of said competition and summarise each entry into the length of a page. In my opinion half of the entries didn't deserve to win. I actually spotted certain paragraphs from different entries that were the same, word for word. Try as I might, I really can't attribute this to coincidence. But blatantly copying from the same source isn't that bad. I mean, it's none of my business who wins anyway.

What really annoyed me was this joker who submitted 11 pages of crap. Waste of my time. Most people follow a train of thought when writing essays. This writer probably blew the train into bits and so everything just fell into one big mess of ideas. That in itself is still bearable. But I kept running into sentences that simply made no sense. Call me fussy but I can't stand people who just use big words for the sake of using it. Half the time they end up looking like a clown instead of looking sophisticated (not that clowns can't be sophisticated). And with all his references to the US army, I'm actually wondering where he got his material from.

Tip of the day: If you're gonna plagiarise, localise as many examples as you can.

Think I'm a little mean. I don't want to look down on others because they wrote a crappy essay. But I did get a little irritated to have to waste my time reading all these essays. Especially since the staff supposed to do this convieniently "fell sick" after she found out that her leave for today wasn't approved.

"Aiyoh your songs all so emo!" - Lydia, on the playlist in my zen. Lol.

posted by NEB at 10:59 PM

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