Lies Your Teachers Tell You

Just kidding!  There will be a post today even though it is still finals week because I need a freaking break.

I have some very exciting news for you: most of the time, when your high school teachers tell you a rule that sounds dumb, it is a rule that only applies to high school!  I knew it - there is no way that "linking verbs" was something that we actually have to avoid.  I mean, come on!  It is not possible to write anything without "were, to, be, is, was, has, etc".  It was all lies.  My lit professor has never even heard of linking verbs.

Start your count-down clocks because the following is a list of things that you will be able to stop worrying about the second you graduate:
- Using third person.  Most of my profs actually PREFER it when you use first person to express your own ideas.  If you go read some peer-reviewed scholarly essays, they totally use first person when they want to.  This applies mostly to literary papers and such, but when was the last time that you felt the need to write "I have observed the same phenomena as Newton" in a paper about physics?  Anyway, if you feel like your sentence is clunky because you are avoiding first person, feel free to use it (in college).
- Linking verbs. (see above) I don't know about you, but I don't think that I ever worried about linking verbs after we finished that unit freshman year.  Still, feel free to continue ignoring that made-up rule.
- Having your works cited page graded.  It has to be present and appear correct, but no one will ever sit down and look up all of your sources to make sure you cited them right.  Just use Easy Bib and be done  because it's good enough. (If you plan on publishing something, that's a different story, but even then you won't be graded on your works cited, just held accountable for it)
- Single-spacing long quotes.  You know that thing where if your quote is more than five lines long then you have to indent it and make the font smaller and single-space it?  Well that is mostly valid, but the single-spacing thing is just a way for your teachers to try to keep you from messing with the minimum length.  Just indent your quotes and leave it at that.
- The "3 levels".  This suckish phenomena is a creation of Peak and does not exist anywhere else.  Guess what?  Apparently most people don't need a little chart to tell them what kind of question they are asking - they can just tell.  Shocking.
- Annotating the prompt.  It is equally shocking that most people are capable of answering a question without first defining every word, writing out steps, and re-stating it in their own words.  No one saw that coming.

So breathe a sigh of relief that you won't have to worry about certain Peakisms after high school.

Unfortunately, there are some things that you will continue to worry about.  Coming soon (with "soon" defined as "the next time I need a freaking break from studying"), Truths Your Teachers Tell You that You Hoped were Lies.