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Wednesday's Top Leftist Abuse: Your Opinions Are Not Accurate

By Bonnie Kristian, on October 22, 2009

Congratulations to Savannah, today's winner of $100 in Campus Reform's "Report a Leftist Abuse" contest!  Savannah completed an essay assignment which asked her to give a connotative definition of the topic of her choice.  "Connotative" "includes the emotions or associations that surround a word."  In other words, the assignment was to explain her view or opinion of the topic she chose.  Savannah chose "freedom" and was told her opinions were "not accurate."

But perhaps I've explained the situation a little too briefly.  Let's start with the relevant portion of the essay prompt, which can be downloaded in its entirety at the bottom of this page.

In this essay, you will create a definition for a word, idea, or phrase to explain how you define your choice to an educated professional audience; this essay will employ more connotative aspects of definition rather than denotative aspects. 

There you can clearly see the request for connotative definition, for opinion.  When Savannah turned in her essay, however, she was told her opinions were inaccurate.  Opinion, by the way, is defined as "a personal view, attitude, or appraisal."  Here's sample 1:

Clip 1

And sample 2:

Clip 3

The interesting thing is the exact language which the professor marks as inaccurate.  It starts with "Not all our founding fathers were Christians."  Presumably no one disagrees with this; it is easy to summon up at least one example -- Thomas Jefferson, for instance -- of a founding father who was not a Christian. 

Next comes, "but the majority believed in God."  A quick Googling, the results of which are neatly summarized here, reveals that there was definitely religious diversity among the group.  Most were Catholics, Protestants, or Deists (all of which believe in God), though some were certainly more anticlerical. So, while perhaps not extremely precise, Savannah does not seem to have any inaccuracy yet. 

Finally, the sentence concludes that the Founding Fathers "fought for freedoms of all religious practices."  The First Amendment seems to establish that fairly well.

"Where is the inaccuracy?" you may ask.  We couldn't find it either.

Savannah will recieve $100 for having the best (which means worse) leftist abuse of the day.   You can still enter a leftist abuse for a chance to win $100. Click here for contest information.

Savannah has asked that her last name be withheld from this post because she is concerned about retaliation against her grade in the class in question should the professor find out she reported an abuse.

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Comments

I don't believe that asking for a connotative definition is at all the same as asking for an opinion, not if the assignment was to relate to a professional, educated audience. It seems to me that the main reason the student did not do well was because she turned in a "rant about people not valuing freedom, rather than an explanation of why the topic defines freedom".  I think if the student had ranted about people who own a lot of guns not valuing freedom the response would have been the same.

If you can't follow the directions for the assignment, it doesn't matter how stupidly partisan you are, one way or the other, you most likely won't do too well.

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