SalmaBrown
New member
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2026
- Messages
- 20
I'm gonna say what no one else seems to be saying in all these culture war debates: the Samantha Fulnecky essay is just... not good. Like, regardless of the content, regardless of the beliefs, regardless of the politics—the WRITING itself is bad. 
I'm an English major, so maybe I'm more sensitive to this stuff, but come ON. There are grammatical errors. There are punctuation mistakes. There's no clear thesis. There's no engagement with the source material. There are sentences that don't make logical sense .
Someone on Facebook posted the essay with the prompt and the grading rubric, and it's genuinely painful to read. One commenter said, "This essay wouldn't even receive a passing grade in grade school, let alone a college campus." Another called it "an incoherent, poorly written word salad." And like... they're not wrong?
The thing that gets me is that Samantha apparently has a 4.0 GPA and has gotten 100s on every other essay in this class . Which either means her previous TAs were incredibly lenient, or she actually did engage with the material before and just... didn't this time? The essay she wrote for this assignment literally doesn't mention the article she was supposed to respond to. At all. She wrote about something completely different .
I showed it to my creative writing professor (just as a curiosity, not for a grade), and she spent ten minutes just circling punctuation errors before she even got to the content. She was like, "This student needs a remedial writing course before she worries about gender ideology."
Look, I'm not saying Samantha deserves to be harassed or that her beliefs are wrong. I'm saying that if I turned this in to any of my professors, I'd get a zero too. And I wouldn't go to Fox News about it—I'd go to the writing center.
Can we please separate the conversation about religious freedom from the conversation about basic writing skills? They're not the same thing.
I'm an English major, so maybe I'm more sensitive to this stuff, but come ON. There are grammatical errors. There are punctuation mistakes. There's no clear thesis. There's no engagement with the source material. There are sentences that don't make logical sense .
Someone on Facebook posted the essay with the prompt and the grading rubric, and it's genuinely painful to read. One commenter said, "This essay wouldn't even receive a passing grade in grade school, let alone a college campus." Another called it "an incoherent, poorly written word salad." And like... they're not wrong?
The thing that gets me is that Samantha apparently has a 4.0 GPA and has gotten 100s on every other essay in this class . Which either means her previous TAs were incredibly lenient, or she actually did engage with the material before and just... didn't this time? The essay she wrote for this assignment literally doesn't mention the article she was supposed to respond to. At all. She wrote about something completely different .
I showed it to my creative writing professor (just as a curiosity, not for a grade), and she spent ten minutes just circling punctuation errors before she even got to the content. She was like, "This student needs a remedial writing course before she worries about gender ideology."
Look, I'm not saying Samantha deserves to be harassed or that her beliefs are wrong. I'm saying that if I turned this in to any of my professors, I'd get a zero too. And I wouldn't go to Fox News about it—I'd go to the writing center.
Can we please separate the conversation about religious freedom from the conversation about basic writing skills? They're not the same thing.
I totally agree. I'm in a poli sci program, so we read a lot of stuff we disagree with, but the expectation is that you can articulate why you disagree with a coherent argument. Fulnecky's essay just... doesn't do that.
It’s such a simple truth. Fix the fundamentals before you try to rebuild the system. Thanks for having the guts to point out that the emperor, in this case, has no clothes and can't write a proper sentence.