5 Things That All English Students Cannot Stand

This blog post is tailored to all of us English Scholars..


1) We are not all 'Grammar Nazis'
God I hate that term. Using the word 'Nazi' to describe anybody who isn't a racist, fascist, small-minded imbecile is offensive and embarrassing. And no, not every English student cares about whether Joe Bloggs wrote 'your' instead of 'you're' on his Facebook status. Every once in a while, you're bound to fuck up on spelling or grammar. Everybody does it, so stop making it your mission to correct every mistake under the sun! We don't think you're clever, we just think you're a stuck up know-it-all.

2) "You study English? Oh, so you must have read..."
Yes I study English. Yes I have read a lot. But please, please don't presume that I have read every book to have ever been published; if anything it'll just make you feel uncomfortable when I tell you that I have never even heard of that particular book. It appears that anybody outside of a University English Department thinks that we just pick books at random from the library and choose to study them. Erm, no! Our modules are pretty tight about what we are supposed to read, and if you think that we have time for extracurricular reading then you are very, very wrong.

3)  "Oh I love that movie!"
Oh, erm, actually I was talking about the book... *Cue awkward silence*. I'm not a snob and I understand that not everybody enjoys to read. Yet I do find it incredibly difficult when people over the age of 15 don't know that The Great Gatsby is one of America's finest pieces of literature and not just "some Leo DiCaprio movie about a rich guy". It makes me despair in all honesty.

4) Other students telling us that we don't do a real degree
Seriously? So I don't do Maths or Quantum Mechanics or Medicine; I'd love to see all those people write an essay on the comedic value of pathos and misfortune in Nabakov, or deciphering and then analysing medieval texts. So to anybody who says that English isn't a real degree - fuck off.

5) Reading...
(The books that we are supposed to). I know this sounds insane and contradictory, but at the end of the day students will be students and do the bare minimum that they need to to get that coveted 2:1. We chose English degrees due to our love and passion of books, yet when somebody tells us that we have to read a novel? Yeah... it aint gonna happen, especially when more often than not you only need to write on three novels max. per module. Therefore, we have all experienced the damning silence of a seminar full of hungover students who have not even bothered to buy the book. Thankfully, there's generally one person (who tends to be fresh as a daisy) who may as well be having a one on one discussion with the tutor. To those people, the rest of us simultaneously despise and salute you.