Students do it too...

[sleigh]

Not follow guidelines, that is. When a writer fails to follow submission guidelines, they're automatically rejected, usually without reading their story.

I told the students in my two Intro To Literature classes this semester that their final papers must be submitted in hard copy. That was to avoid the problem of being sent attachments in formats I can't read, or of getting garbled attachments, or of being sent the paper in plain text in the body of the e-mail rather than in correct format, or of the inevitable student who claims "I e-mailed you the paper; didn't you get it?" And also, frankly, because I'm not going to read the papers online, so the student is passing off to me the expense of printing out the paper, and that's just flat-out rude (and costly, if all forty-odd students do the same).

So what did I have in my e-mail inbox this morning? You guessed it. Now, the question is whether I should accept them or not. Right now it's only two, so I'm inclined to take them, but I can guarantee I won't be in a good mood when I'm grading them...

Bleh. Read the guidelines!

EDITED TO ADD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All of you are right -- see, I can learn from peer input. :-) Consider it done.

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

In a situation similar to this, I allowed an emailed paper to confirm that the paper had been done by deadline, but insisted on a hard copy to be in my hands before I graded the paper. (What I explained to the student was that since I had 30 or so papers to grade anyway, I had no problem saving theirs for last...as long as it was in my hands by the time I was ready to grade it.)