One thing I do for a living while I'm not coming up with glorious one-liners for this blog, is edit student papers as a tutor. I work for a service, and not specific students as clients most of the time. This means that each student gets about 20 minutes. This is not a lot of time to read the essay, make suggestions, send it back to them, and talk about why their grammar makes me cry.

Ipso facto, students who tell me to "check everything" when I ask what they want me to look for in their essay that looks like a drunk hamster wrote it as a side effect from running across a keyboard, well- it is irritating.

Check everything? Really? Absolutely everything?

Careful now, wayward student. I'm planning on going to grad school for creative writing, you may not want to give me carte blanche to check everything I can think of.

It makes me want to check their paper from the perspective of a Japanese speaker, pointing out that the only words I recognized in their paper were "ninja" "samurai" and "no", this last being not used as a verb at all.

I would check for every single informal fallacy, and point out all of them in excruciating detail. I would point out to them that i checked their paper for heroic verse, and that the feet, meter, and rhyming scheme were all wrong, as well as a suspicious lack of an epic central hero, unless you count them on their daring adventures involving their class trip to a museum, which I don't. Unless they beheaded a tour guide, in which case, maybe.