They aren’t just papers… they are your linguistic signature…

Thinking of the words of Julia Alvarez…On the weekend before the first graduate papers are due, submitted, and assessed… Graduate students, please remember…
                                                                       Your work is not just papers… they are your linguistic signature…

“Sister Maria stood at the chalkboard.

Her hand, tap-tap-tapping on the board.

“Here’s a simple sentence: The snow fell.”

Sister pointed with her chalk.

“But watch what happens when we put an adverb at the beginning,

 ‘Gently, the snow fell on the bare hills.’”

Sister Maria filled the chalkboard with snowy print, 

on and on, 

handling and shaping and moving the language

until English became a charged, fluid mass

that carried me in its great fluent waves, 

rolling and moving onward,

to deposit me on the shores of my new homeland.”

~Julia Alvarez, Something to Declare: Essays.
Plume publishing. 978-0452280670