Well, if one could die from poor prose, my ten-strong audience would've kicked it by now...

I'm still in the recovering process from correcting my student papers, and although I'm a relatively inexperienced adjunct, I matched the tenured profs this past week when it comes to complaining about how the kids get worse every semester. No more, though, new rules for next semester. First drafts are now mandatory, and I'm going to make sure the students know the extra five pages they'll need to write are the fault of their peers.

Secondly, exclusively online sources are forbidden. Maybe I only just noticed it, but it seems a lot of students got into trouble this way. The most hilarious example came from a student who Googled Gogol(heh) and used a paper written by a high school student as the primary source. Some students also got around my "don't use my lecture notes" request by using online lecture notes from other Russian lit. professors. Now, they have to crack a book, which will probably result in a lot of footnotes ending with "p. 2".

I've no doubt these new steps will stem the tide of bad writing as effectively as the parasol Wile E. Coyote uses to protect himself against falling boulders.