quote:Bind this crafty trickster fast in chains Of adamantine bonds that none can break; For he, thy choice flower stealing, the bright glory Of fire that all arts spring from, hath bestowed it On mortal men. And so for fault like this He now must pay the Gods due penalty, That he may learn to bear the sovereign rule Of Zeus, and cease from his philanthropy.
[...] —Ćschylus Prometheus Bound, trans. Edward Plumptre The site closely resembles what Berlin might have looked like in Nineteen Sixty-One, just as the wall that came to represent the iron curtain dividing Europe and, with Europe, much of humanity, was being built. Like the Berliners, the people on either side of the wall speak the same language and belong to the same nation, a nation divided by states, and, like the Berliners, one side is condemned to poverty under a system which offers little chance of self-improvement and no chance of assistance. Differences exist, certainly: the Berlin Wall, which started out as a barricade little sturdier than this one in Arizona, was built to prevent emigration, this wall is to prevent immigration, and the government of México is simply corrupt, not the terrifying authoritarian of ill-named German Democratic Republic. Such protestations, while accurate, can hardly be of any comfort to the residents of the border shanty towns for whom prosperity must seem to loom over the horizon each day, separated from them only by a seven foot fence and a heavily armed border guard. The barbed wire and submachine guns tell the story of a war, a war not between states, but between a state and individuals. The battles for survival along the border, with families being faced with paramilitaries and children behind barbed wire detention center walls, is echoed by a second war, the war of ideas, fought on the floors of Congress and on the streets of cities, in which free-trade must battle mercantilism, humanism face neo-conservatism and in which the fundamental aspects of humanity and the relations between individuals and the state must be addressed. (Appendix A)
Until 1875, when criminals and prostitutes were excluded, there were no qualifications for immigration, although the President had the right to deny immigration to residents of a power at war with the United States, indeed, there was not even an attempt to ascertain how many immigrated to the country in any given year until 1798, yet by 1882, all Chinese persons were banned from entry for no reason other than that there was a general feeling that there were too many of them, and, of course, that they provided compitetion. By 1921, there was a prescribed quota for how many immigrants were to be admitted from each country, one hundred for Greece and four-hundred for all the territories in sub-saharan Africa, a system which, with slight and meager reform, remained in place until 1965, when it was overturned by Hart-Celler Act, which was partially sponsored by Ted Kennedy. All current immigration laws are based off this act, which abolished country specific quotas but, in order to appease various factions in Congress, still significantly limits immigration. (USCIS)
National defense is often cited as necessitating a closely guarded border, generally by conservatives who wish to reconcile preëxisting views on immigration with Objectivist-influenced neo-liberalism. The U.S.-México border does not present the same security threat as the U.S.-Canada border, which is far closer to major cities and international air ports on both sides yet is largely unguarded. Of the nineteen hijackers responsible for the attacks of 11 September, 2001, thirteen are believed to have been U.S. nationals, the rest are of uncertain origin. None are believed to have crossed the U.S.-México border. (F.B.I.) Richard Reid, who attempted to explode a bomb in his shoe on an American Airlines flight was born and educated in Britain and is thought to have spent time in Egypt, France, Pakistan, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey, Israel and Afghanistan, but almost certainly never visited Latin América. (B.B.C.)
Racism is heavily prevalent among many anti-immigration organizations, with new anti-immigrant lobbied joined some older groups such as the Klu Klux Klan, which devotes much of its web site (www.kkk.bz) to arguing that people of non-northern European descent were never supposed to be allowed to immigrate and there is doubtless a great degree of truth in their belief that many of the signers of the Constitution agreed with their views; however, regardless of the personal views of any signatories, such a specification was never written into the Constitution and if it had been, would have been overturned some time ago, or else the country would have collapsed in the late nineteenth century. The National Vanguard, a neo-Nazi group, is more outspoken in their views even than the Klan, claiming that immigrants seek to create a new state called “Aztlan,” part of what they see as an attempt to suppress “White Heritage” (the Post Office is apparently a major player in this.) Most anti-immigrant lobbies would argue that these unabashedly racist, or, as they prefer, “racialist,” groups are not representative of their cause, and it is true that more mainstream groups have stressed that they are not opposed to legal residents. However, while the Minutemen, a prominent paramilitary group, tells prospective members, in a bizarrely worded second-person appeal, that they “are considering joining the MinutemanHQ not because of bias towards people from another country, but rather because you feel your government owes the citizens of the United States protection from people who wish to take advantage of a free society,” the organization cannot testify to rather or not it has any Hispanic members, which would seem to suggest that any potential Hispanic members have not reached the upper echelons of power. (Appendix B) Institutions like the minutemen often cite a simple and easy to understand reason necessitating a closed border or even the deportation of people without proper documentation: such people are “illegal” and their presence on U.S. soil is thus a violation of U.S. law. This assumption, so brutally portrayed by Hugo in the character of Javert, rests on the assumption, which has no validity or basis in any philosophy save perhaps Chinese Legalism, that the law is inherently virtuous and must be upheld. These sentiments, and unfortunate manifestation of humanities desire for order beyond all else, are far more alien to the United States than any human being could ever be. In the founding document of the country, which has been imitated innumerably often in almost every country, it is stated that, while
quote: Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
It is the essential thesis of democracy that laws have no virtue in themselves, and must be cast aside when they are shown to aversely affect the citizenry, or when any effects, however positive, are outweighed by the negative consequences suffered by any segment of the population. Democracy is not, and cannot be, a system in which the greatest good is done for the greatest number, such a system is inherently authoritarian, but rather must be a system were the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number is held as being admirable if and only if it does not infringe upon the basic rights of a human being. The first right of humanity, as established in 1789 by the National Assembly of the French Republic, is that “[man is] born and remain[s] free and equal in rights.” The philosophy of Locke, upon which the United States, like all other states which can legitimately claim to be democratic, is based, is a philosophy of Natural Law. Laws are not written by the state but exist as an essential part of humanity, and thus the rights granted, by birthright, to a citizen of one country should not, cannot, must not, be denied to another human being because of the misfortune of being born on the wrong side of a river. The actions of the United States government cannot be justified without a belief that those who were not born into the state of grace are not to be considered human beings but untermensch, bringing the country back to its Calvinist roots and demonstrating the degree of xenophobia present in many anti-immigration movements.
Inspired by the same xenophobia as all other anti-immigration arguments, but deserving special consideration is populist anti-liberalization rhetoric. On January 1, 1994, the United States entered into a free trade agreement with México and Canada, but the agreement was incomplete by design, as NAFTA’s supporters, in both parties, could not rally enough support for the agreement as it was, and were disinclined on various reasons to extend it. For this reason, it is currently easier to move objects, even businesses, around North América than people, in direct defiance of both the Socialist ideal of the international brotherhood of workers and the liberal belief in free-trade, which is held as an essential aspect of Smithean economics. (Buchanan and Young.) A report appearing in The Economist, a leading center-right international journal, in 2000, conceded that immigration had a slightly negative effect on individuals in high earning technology jobs and a more pronounced effect on unskilled laborers, but demonstrated the overall benefits to the U.S. economy, which, if properly managed, should benefit all residents of the country. The survey points out that, while dependents of immigrants are considered immigrants, adult children are not counted, meaning that their rôle in society is only noted as they receive benefits, not as the pay taxes, a systematic bias which leads to a severe underestimation of the economic benefits of immigration. (Economist) The most vocal critics of free and open borders have been labor unions, traditional bastions of Socialism now mercantilists, however even they have not been universal in their condemnation, the United Farm Workers of America, Cesar Chavez’s former union and the union most heavily influenced by immigration, is one of the more vocal voices for liberation, not least because of its high number of immigrant members. (UFW)
The state exists to serve both the individual and the collective good, and has no purpose when it neglects both the individual and the collective good, as is clearly the case in the instance of immigration when the good of the collective, that is the world economy, and the good of the individual, immigrants, is subjugated to the good of a minority group, regardless of how large this minority group is. There exists a common misconception that it is the duty of the state to protect its citizens, either collectively or as individuals. The population of any state is, at the time of this writing, a minority within the population of the world, and thus any actions taken to secure the position of the citizen of any stat above the citizens of other states are inherently antidemocratic. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that Mercantilism is an ineffectual economic system and that attempts to secure the economy of one state at the expense of the world economy are doomed to fail. When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he made it clear that the United States was to be a country where the rights of “all men” not the rights of the citizen, which are never mentioned in that document, were to be upheld. A leader who neglects the welfare of all men in favor of the supposed welfare of his voters must be either corrupt or foolish, and a state led by such leaders can only fail, turning perpetual inward and spiraling into oblivion and stagnation. In the context of The Bean Trees, Taylor’s actions are the actions of a patriot and a humanist, one who is not content to see the world run for the profit of the few at the expense not only of the many, but in the end, also of the few.
Such abstract thoughts are easier to comprehend when viewed in terms of individual human lives. It is easier to favor the deportation of undocumented workers than the deportation of Juan, who works at the raspado stand and gives a discount to longtime customers. But even immigrants who commit crimes on U.S. soil should not, cannot, be deported, firstly as many come from régimes with records of human rights abuses, thus making deportation a violation of U.S. and International Laws, but also because doing so denies the responsibility of the state for all those within its borders, regardless of their status. How could Taylor abandon her friends in the name of an abstract law enacted by a state which has done so little for her? Any Senator or Congressman who believes that she would displays a dangerous level of naďveté, if not stupidity. Taylor, like most human beings when faced with the same dilemma, has decided that an individual human being is more important than a legislation, which has no life. It is the decision made by Huck Finn when he says “all right, then, I’ll go to Hell” and a sentiment echoed throughout western literature, it is no less than the choice of Prometheus to defy the gods for the love of humanity. A Prometheus swells within the heart of every human, but he has not yet, with Herculean effort, been unbound. Each human must unbind his own Prometheus, as Taylor unbound hers. When the state neglects individuals, then more than ever it is the duty of the individual to protect other individuals, even when such actions require defiance of the government. Mahatma Ghandi preached a philosophy of Satyagraha, a philosophy of which transcends mere civil disobedience, in Ghandi jee’s own words to the people of Anand, “a satyagrahi's path is the path of love, not one of enmity. It should be the ambition of a satyagrahi to win over even the most hard-hearted of enemies through love.” The word Satyagraha contains implications of suffering, suffering in order to do what is right, and all must suffer this way or another when the government is unjust, hoping that through Satyagraha we may change the hearts of leaders and lead a nation to the waters of peace and tolerance. Doubtless Taylor’s Satyagraha would have been purer had she acted more openly, in the manner of Socrates’s defiance of the Athenian council, but should she have offered Estevan and Esperanza to this ideal? Satyagraha demands no such blood sacrifice. (Ghandian Institute.)
Appendix : Corespondence. To: minutemenHQ Subject: A Question Concerning your Organization Dear Sir or Madam, Are there currently and Hispanic members of your organization? Sincerly, ****
To **** Subject: Re: A Question Concerning Your Organization. ****, We do not ask that type of question of our volunteers. Works Cited Buchanan, James M. and Yong J. Yoon. “Globilization as Framed by the Two Logics of Trade.” The Independent Review. 6 (2003): 399 – 405. Klu Klux Klan. n.d. Klu Klux Klan. 7 May, 2006.<http://www.kkk.bz/index1.htm> MinutemenHQ. n.d. Minutemen Civil Defense Corps. 7 May, 2006. <http://www.minutemanhq.com/hq/> National Vanguard. 7 May, 2006. National Vanguard. 7 May, 2006. <http://www.nationalvanguard.org> United Farm Workers. 2006. United Farm Workers of America. 7 May, 2006. United States of America. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Immigration and Naturalization Legislation 1790 – 1996. Washington, D.C.: United States of America, 2003. United States of America. Federal Bureau of Investigations. Press Release: The FBI releases 19 photographs of individuals believed to be the hijackers of the four airliners that crashed on September 11, 01. Washington, D.C.: United States of America, 2001. Who Gains? Not Only the Immigrants, but America Too. The Economist. May 9, 2000. “Who is Richard Reid?” BBC News. 28 December, 2001. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1731568.stm>
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I am certainly glad to see how seriously this is being taken. Note, Estevan and Esperanza are charecters in a novel by Babbara Kingsolver, but could stand for any undocumented worker.
Posts: 1332 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Were we supposed to take it seriously with that title?
Maybe, and this is just a suggestion, but maybe you should preface the title with some tags (i.e. **Seriously guys - Prometheus Bound? Notes on the Anti-Humanism of the United States Congress**Seriously...no joking).
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The image of Prometheus is one of the most common in western culture, and Antihumanism is a common, albeit gravely mistaken in my view, philosophical school which seems to have become common in the U.S. Congress. Thus the title, combining an easily recognizable motif with a direct expression of content seems perfectly valid to me.
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quote:Thus the title, combining an easily recognizable motif with a direct expression of content seems perfectly valid to me.
And yet it doesn't seem to have resonated with your target audience the way you'd hoped it would. Why do you think that is?
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Noemon, I can only assume that my view, which I still hold, as to the Anti-humanist influence in Congress is not universally shared, nor did I expect it to be. I did, however, expect this to spark an entirely different debate, i.e. one on the subject of Legalism vs. Humanism and their various rôles in shaping our society.
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HumanTarget, I do not write to convey a sense of my own intelligence. I do, however, write knowing that there is a grand tradition of English prose writing and I strive, albeit feebly, to do justice to that grandeur. That is my only concern other than to convey information.
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twinky, yes to a degree, but I admit to being more careful about preserving diacritics in writing than in speech.
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Here's how you "spark a debate" amongst adults, Pel:
"I've been thinking about the debate on illegal immigration and the building of a wall between the US and Mexico. The US Congress wants to do X, Y, and Z, but I agree/disagree based on B, C, and D. What I find particularly interesting is how closely this resembles ancient Greek mythology, in the sense that blah blah blah. What do you all think? Is this a matter of Legalism vs. Humanism, or something else entirely?"
Or something along those lines. I'm not sure what point it is you're trying to make, exactly, so you may need to change a few of the X's and D's around a little. Posts: 1681 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Pelegius: I did, however, expect this to spark an entirely different debate, i.e. one on the subject of Legalism vs. Humanism and their various rôles in shaping our society.
And yet it failed to do so. Why do you think that that is?
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JK, no, it was not. The current form is one I turned in for credit to a Prof, but the ideas and much of the writing predates the assignment.
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quote:Originally posted by Pelegius: twinky, yes to a degree, but I admit to being more careful about preserving diacritics in writing than in speech.
Pel, honey, nobody loves geeks more than I do. Really. Smart guys are hot. But even I am starting to want to give you a wedgie.
You have found what could be a comfy place here - a community where people will listen to your ideas with a degree of respect and understanding that you aren't going to find just anywhere. Most of the folks here are pretty smart.
Do you really want to wreck that? To annoy or insult people here to the point where we don't bother reading what you've written? Where even we don't listen to you?
Please think about it. I am on your side.
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I tried reading this, I really did. I feel bad about not finishing many of your posts in other threads. Golly though, you REALLY need to use some periods every now and then. I'm just a simple engineer and that many run-on sentences makes me winded. By the time I read some sentence that had what seemed like 17 different clauses in it, I gave up on this one too. There is something to be said for expressing ideas simply and straighforward.
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quote:Originally posted by Pelegius: twinky, yes to a degree, but I admit to being more careful about preserving diacritics in writing than in speech.
You realize that the circumflex in that instance has no effect on the pronunciation, right? That it does nothing more than show that a letter has been elided?
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quote:Originally posted by Phanto: You have a lot of grammar problems in how you link sentences together.
I didn't even get far enough in to notice any grammar problems. The impenetrable blocks of text deterred me. Give me some paragraph breaks first, and then I might try to read it.
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Give Pel a break. I think he's trying hard to intellectualize a position that's hard to justify in the history of jurisprudence. I think he's saying that its OK to ignore certain laws (in this case immigration laws) if he thinks they are immoral and arbitrary. In other words, its better to let Pel or foreigners judge which laws they will obey and which they will ignore because that's the nice thing to do.
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quote:Originally posted by Pelegius: I did, however, expect this to spark an entirely different debate, i.e. one on the subject of Legalism vs. Humanism and their various rôles in shaping our society.
And yet it failed to do so. Why do you think that that is?
I'll bet it's everybody else's fault.
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quote:Originally posted by Pelegius: [twinky, yes to a degree, but I admit to being more careful about preserving diacritics in writing than in speech.
Okay. I was just wondering how you managed to pronounce the circonflex without pronouncing the French "r." I actually speak French without an English accent, and I'm not quite sure how I'd do it.
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Pel was an insufferable bore and blow hard on Ornery and he has not changed.
Yeah, that's about how I feel, Mark - minus the part about not being on his side.
Pel, if you shape up you can do well here. If not, your glory will pass from here as it did at Ornery - likely in the same way.
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quote:Originally posted by Pelegius: Jon Boy, it also shows that the letter is long, and there are seven paragraph breaks.
Okay, so it looks like you might be right about the circumflexed o. However, it makes the vowel long, not the letter. I'd be interested to know if you also pronounce role with a uvular r and a non-velarized l. After all, why try to pronounce it like the French if you're only going to get it 1/3 right?
You put seven paragraph breaks in something that came out to three pages of text in single-spaced 10-point Arial with 1.5-inch margins. That's about two paragraph breaks a page, which does not make for readable type.
Also, you might be interested to know that you earned a Flesch Reading Ease score of 25.9 (100 being easiest to read). You might be able to bump this score up a bit if you didn't average 40.7 words per sentence.
Edit: Heh. Twinky beat me to that first part.
And another question: why the acute accent in America? You can't claim to be preserving a mark if it was never there to begin with.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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You know, Jon Boy, I never even realized that it's spelled "circumflex" in English -- I've never had to use it in English. I learned it with French and have only ever used it in that language, until now. Hence, "circonflex." I'll try to remember to use the English spelling when I'm writing in Enligsh. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Twinky: For a long time I only knew the accents by their French names, because, as you said, no one ever talks about them in English, so it's not at all surprising that you wouldn't know, either. I think I learned them sometime in high school thanks to my compulsive reading of reference books.
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I usually use the Spanish América, to refer to all of América as opposed to the English America to refer to the U.S. As for your point about the supposed ability of algorithms to determine readability, I did not have any complaints about this paper from anyone who read it before it being posted on Hatrack. Make of that what you will.
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Different venue. Like the way even amazing opera singers sound "off" when they sing pop music.
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Perhaps, I was worried that the tone in my essay was actually a little too populist and not academic enough.
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Edit: Grr, you beat me to it. I was going to say something like "Well, I think you dodged the bullet on that one Pelegius" but I wanted to be the first one laughing. Missed it anyway
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quote:I did not have any complaints about this paper from anyone who read it before it being posted on Hatrack. Make of that what you will.
Yeah, it's called 'writing for your audience'. I wouldn't worry about it, though. There's no audience for something like this.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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You essay is all over the map. In order to find a discernable thesis, I had to wade through paragraphs of your vamping.
Let's take this first paragraph:
quote: The site closely resembles what Berlin might have looked like in Nineteen Sixty-One, just as the wall that came to represent the iron curtain dividing Europe and, with Europe, much of humanity, was being built. Like the Berliners, the people on either side of the wall speak the same language and belong to the same nation, a nation divided by states, and, like the Berliners, one side is condemned to poverty under a system which offers little chance of self-improvement and no chance of assistance. Differences exist, certainly: the Berlin Wall, which started out as a barricade little sturdier than this one in Arizona, was built to prevent emigration, this wall is to prevent immigration, and the government of México is simply corrupt, not the terrifying authoritarian of ill-named German Democratic Republic. Such protestations, while accurate, can hardly be of any comfort to the residents of the border shanty towns for whom prosperity must seem to loom over the horizon each day, separated from them only by a seven foot fence and a heavily armed border guard. The barbed wire and submachine guns tell the story of a war, a war not between states, but between a state and individuals. The battles for survival along the border, with families being faced with paramilitaries and children behind barbed wire detention center walls, is echoed by a second war, the war of ideas, fought on the floors of Congress and on the streets of cities, in which free-trade must battle mercantilism, humanism face neo-conservatism and in which the fundamental aspects of humanity and the relations between individuals and the state must be addressed.
What's the subject of the paragraph? Is it this cite? Is it Berlin? Is it the Berliners? Is it the difference between us and the Berliners or the similarities?
And look at your second sentence. We don't have a real wall, so you are talking about a metaphorical wall, but you said, "Like the Berliners," so you are talking about people who were dealing with a real wall. But the referent to your "people" is ambiguous. Are you talking about hatrackers, USA citizens, and whoever you are talking about still has an ambiguous relationship with this wall, except we know it's a metaphorical wall?
A very clear writer once told me to have one subject per paragraph, two subjects if necessary. Try it out.
Posts: 5600 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Pelegius, you have inspired me to quote Chesterton, for which I thank you.
quote:It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,"ť you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,"ť you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard.
posted
Pelegius - I'm a senior at a top-50 liberal arts college, majoring in economics and philosophy (with an emphasis on ethics). I also particpate in Ethics Bowl, which is basically debate in applied ethics. These experiences have given me a pretty good background to write and discuss issues such as immigration, which has political, economic, and ethical components.
The type of prose you exhibit here would be thrown out by every professor I've had a class with. Especially the philosophy professors. You have some good ideas floating around in your mind, I'm sure, but your writing needs a little work if you want to express those ideas effectively. First - get a copy of Strunk's Element of Style. Read it. Second - consider getting a copy of The Oxford Essential Guide to Critical Writing, or a simliar puplication. Read it. Third - read through the Economist's style guide (http://economist.com/research/StyleGuide/). The Economist has some of the best writing in the world, imho. It's witty, clear, and clean prose that develops and defines the issue, while often arguing for a particular stance. You'd do well to try to emulate it.
Academese, even for an academic, is not something you want to aspire to. If your teachers approve of your prose, then I can't think much of your teachers. And it's not going to cut it when you get to college.
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I am a huge fan of dense, erudite prose and poesy. I used to own a James Joyce T-shirt. There are poets I admire that other people just don't get, because they either don't understand the references or just don't take away the sheer, untrammeled joy I feel from seeing the written word teased and tweaked and splashed across a page.
I have occasionally purchased novels whose plots were completely uninteresting to me just because the sentence structure was, in my opinion, complicated and delicious.
You have a hint of this in your writing; your point, as it should in these pieces, wanders around and randomly abuts certain semiotic touchstones, looking for things to stick to and transform into something greater. It's kind of like a cross between a single strand of spaghetti and a single fleck of saffron in that respect.
But this is not the way to communicate. When James Joyce wanted coffee, he did not say, "Valdez awakes, struggling with his donkey -- or was it burro -- through oily clouds and misty mountains of despair. The eagles! The eagles! With milk!"
If you're writing to entertain us, do like monteverdi does and grab your own little thread (or, better yet, a literary blog), so that those of us who find the act of reading entertaining can drop by when we want. But if you're writing to get a point across, and if you know what that point is and aren't just using your rambling writing style to explore a dozen memes on the way to an uncertain conclusion, try to invite discussion. The way to do this is through concise, clear, and open-ended speech; you can still be playful and witty, but it's not necessary (and is in fact counter-productive) to be heavy-handed.
People aren't going to drop by what you've written to admire it. Yet. They're going to drop by to participate, and so far the only hook you've given them is the opportunity to poke at you for being stiff.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Pelegius: I did, however, expect this to spark an entirely different debate, i.e. one on the subject of Legalism vs. Humanism and their various rôles in shaping our society.
And yet it failed to do so. Why do you think that that is?
posted
I just can't believe that a teacher told you this was good writing.. God you are going to get murdered in university...
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I would be grateful if anyone could post specific suggestions. The only one I have heard is that the paragraphs are too long, which is debatable (there are certainly world-class writers, such as Sartre who would use much shorter ones, and others, equally well-respected, who would use much longer ones, Victor Hugo springing to mind.) I am seriously interested in serious suggestions, but less seriously interested in less serious suggestions.
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