Voluntary Extra-credit Assignment, worth an additional 5%

This assignment is due on Friday, 15 April. If you are in a Friday discussion, you should bring this assignment with you to class; if you are in the Wednesday discussion, you should place it in Professor Spang's History Department mailbox (in Ballantine 742) before 4:00 p.m. This assignment is completely voluntary; you don't have to do it if you don't want to. Please note, however, that no credit will be given for work submitted after 4:00 on Friday, 15th April.

Here, you will see a less-than-stellar student essay about "Economic Crisis during the French Revolution." Your job is to print it and to grade it as if you were the professor teaching the class. I know some professors write very few comments, but that would not be a good way to complete this assignment! Instead, I hope you will write copious comments, noting errors of fact and logic as well as grammatical and punctuation mistakes. You should write full marginal comments; you should also write a paragraph-long final comment and give the paper a grade. I do not expect that you are going to find this an easy assignment, but I hope it will be interesting. To help you with the grading, you may want to see:

• Dr. Spang's guidelines for paper writing
• Indiana University's Writing Tutorial Service (if you look at the html-version of the "pamphlets" they will open in your web browser)
• William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style (1918)—a classic