Pure S#!+: the best of F&M's worst

How common is a venture that generates money and spreads good cheer?

Not very. There’s little funny about multinational corporations and ruthless Wall Street trading floors, and nothing lucrative about three-legged dogs.   

There may, however, exist a cross-section.

I propose a compilation of F&M students’ most embarrassing, appalling, middle-school-quality work: haphazardly-typed theses, term papers riddled with tense problems, menial lab write-ups scribbled on loose leaf, and incoherent French essays about “le weekend” or “mon chien.” 

And for those with short attention spans or who prefer humor in brevity, there will be lists of shamefully infantile introductory sentences (“Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743;” “For so long man has strove to conquer beast”).

Every so often you’ll stumble across one of these disasters: in the recycling trays at the libraries, or saved to a public computer. You can spot them from across the room; distinguishing features include triple-spaced lines, four-inch margins, and Arial font.

To amass these higher education mishaps, a group of dedicated students can scavenge trash bins, call for submissions, and/or solicit disgruntled professors. And at the close of every semester, the most outrageously incompetent works will be compiled, bound, and released in a tidy collection called Pure S#!+. It will be wildly entertaining, utterly cringe-inducing, and make us all more than a bit ashamed. All sales proceeds will be donated to a fictional, ambiguous charity (The Pierce Foundation, R.E.M.E.D.Y., etc.) and promptly pocketed by the editors.        

Foundation courses are veritable fountains of dreadful work and prime hunting grounds; inept freshman, coupled with inanely broad essay prompts like “Using any literature from the past millennium, discuss the concept of good,” are a formula for some of the worst—and funniest—papers ever penned. Runner-up classes include introductory music composition, entry-level Chinese, and any course on existentialism.        

Also, a proper introduction is cardinal to any anthology; an irate forward from a professor—one who received an overwhelmingly large amount of rubbish work—is a necessity. English professors would craft rancorous introductions: imagine the fury when grading a paper titled “Heart of Darkness: An Allegory for the Iraq Conflict.”

Enough of the intricately bound and overwhelmingly pretentious literary magazines that showcase art house photogs and adolescent world-travelers; F&M needs to celebrate and consecrate the best drivel and idiocy of each semester. So—comb through your Word files and unearth the most disturbing work you can find.