Mundane

Mundane, mediocre, incompetent--all these words describe how I'm feeling right now. It's amazing how much power an essay grade has over an English major. We are powerless against the grade, against the red comments staining our once white pages. And we realize that anything less than an A is mundane, mediocre, incompetent--not good enough, because we know someone has a triumphant A+ written at the top of their paper, or because maybe our grade would be good enough in engineering or chemistry or math or biology, but in English, the grade is a reflection on us--our writing is us. So we know we have failed, not so much because our grade, but because our ideas, our words, our very thoughts are not rich or pliant enough to earn the illustrious A. Therefore, we are not an A; our thinking is not an A, and that bites deep. A weak pen is more useless than a blunt sword.