Turnitin is Terrible

            I started the final stretch of my essay at 6:30 on Thursday November 24^th with only about a page already written that didn’t work all that well as a beginning anyway. I had seventeen and a half hours before the paper needed to be turned in online. I spent the first two hours just reworking the first page and then my brain was exhausted so I went back to bed. I slept for an hour and got up feeling fully recharged and after that, other than pee breaks, breaks to make tea and coffee and the quickest bites, I worked for the rest of the day without getting tired till the end.

            I had been offered work at OCADU that day but I had to turn it down for the sake of the essay. If I had already booked when the date of the essay was announced I wouldn’t have dropped the job, but I was glad there was no work for that day.

            The thesis of my essay was to use the Cluster Theory to prove that Leonard Cohen’s novel, Beautiful Losers, is a work of high art. The categories that are associated with fine art as applied to literature are verity, coherence, contemplation, and the requirement of the writer that they have utilized a skillful mastery over their discipline to produce a distinctive contribution to literature. I went through every category and found examples in Cohen’s book to prove my point. I tried including quotes but realized early on that that would be impossible for this essay that was not supposed to exceed 1,200 words. So I just had to put the page numbers in brackets to indicate where the examples were to be found.

            Arguing that Beautiful Losers is coherent seems a bit crazy at first glance because on the surface the narrative is totally incoherent because the narrator is communicating a state of confusion. But the category requires that the work be coherent in the sense of it comprising an organic whole and since the narrator’s confusion is not the author’s, I think I was able to successfully argue on its behalf.

            There was no problem showing that the novel is masterfully written, but the final category of contemplativeness was more difficult. Not that the book is not contemplative, on the contrary, it is extremely so, but the application of cluster theory requires that consideration of the opposite qualities must also be given. In the other categories, the opposite counterpart of verity is shallowness; the opposite of coherence is predictability and the opposite of masterfulness is ineptness. These opposites do not show themselves in the creation of the book at all. But the opposite of contemplativeness is sensationalism and I couldn’t honestly argue that the book does not try to stimulate the reader on a basic level. But the big revelation that occurred to me while writing on this category is that no novel could possibly be fully contemplative. Any novel requires that there be sensational elements to move the narrative along. That however didn’t detract from the work being proven as one of fine art, because the cluster theory allows for some leaning towards pop art while still being considered high art.

            I still had to fiddle with the wording of my argument for a while, and then I had to present an opposing argument and disprove that. 1,200 words is such a short space to complete an argument that it’s like the essay version of a haiku.

            At around 22:30 I had to start indicating all the relevant pages and make sure the citations were in place. I also cited the textbook article that wrote about the cluster theory and I indicated which pages the article was on, but I realized after handing the paper in that I’d forgotten to put a bracket in my text in reference to the article’s author. I hope I didn’t lose too many marks for that.

            So after working 16 hours that day on the essay I was ready to upload it to turnitin.com. That’s when the real frustrations began. I realized when I arrived at the site that I’d forgotten my password from last time. I still had half an hour before the deadline at that point though, so I thought I’d just get another password. Getting a new password on Google or Twitter takes about thirty seconds if one’s email address is still the same. But turnitin is not a very user-friendly site. One window I called up for changing my password told me that my email address was not on their records. Another one told me that someone else was currently using that email address and so I should use another one. It could be that I was just exhausted, but I could not figure out how to proceed in submitting my paper. I went on the student run Facebook page for the course at around quarter to the deadline and cried for help. Someone tried to help but it wasn’t a solution. Some idiot responded by posting a link to Super Mario Brothers on YouTube. At the moment of the deadline I copied my essay and pasted it into an email to Professor Russell just for a record to prove that I was on time. I then went back to trying to figure out the problem. I repeated the same things over and over. I checked over and over to see if there was some link that I had overlooked or some instruction that I had not followed properly. It had been so much easier with the first essay because I didn’t have to remember a password, but rather just had to make one up. Finally though, at around 1:00, I fiddled with the log-in form and tried what I thought might have been my original password. After a couple of tries the green checkmarks appeared to the right, allowing me to log in and finally upload my essay. Before that I had never been even a minute late handing in a paper.
            Of course, forgetting a password is my error, but turnitin should have made it easier to change it. As it was, they stubbornly made it so I had to remember the old one after an hour and a half of panic. If I hadn’t remembered it I would have been screwed. What a horrible academic “service” turnitin.com is!