Essay, Or Not Esse?

I'm not a great fan of University coursework; well no one who has to do it (or mark it for that matter) is a great fan of it, but I especially dislike it in relation to Latin, my Arts major. One of my lecturers agrees and thinks setting a coursework essay for Latin is ridiculous. Instead, since the University forces him to give us some sort of coursework, we have to study different parts of the text we are studying, outside of class. This works much better as far as I'm concerned, but alas other lecturers haven't caught on. So in the second semester last year, I had to write a coursework essay for our course on Cicero' Philippics. 

Lacking in motivation to do this, I put it off for some time. We were given a list of possible topics well in advance, which meant I really didn't look at them until the date was looming on the calendar. Eventually I decided to have a look at them; almost all of them seemed to require a great deal of research, which I really didn't want to do. So, I chose what seemed to be the easiest question. It basically involved a comparison of the two main speeches we had studied so far. One of these was a speech to the people, the other to the senate, so there was a number of ways you could compare the two.

Some Raw Data

When I started looking at the essay, about a week before it was due, I realised that I really had no idea how I was going to go about answering the question. So lacking in motivation to do anything else, I decided I would harness my OCD penchant for statistics and do some statistical analyses of the two texts. It was easy enough to analyse things like word length using a computer programme, but it was not as easy to count the number of times a particular word was used because Latin has many cases, and therefore the endings of many words change frequently depending on the circumstances. So, I decided to go through each one and count the words manually. That was no easy task; their combined length was over 300 words and I was counting several different things at once.

Click To Enlarge!

When eventually I had all the raw data, I tabulated and compared the stats to see what conclusions I could draw. I had gone into the exercise recalling a rather throw-away comment my lecturer had made, that Cicero used more subjunctive verbs when he talked to the senate. And guess what? The numbers added up! For those of you who don't have your BA in Latin, this basically means that the language he used was more complicated when he talked to the more important people. Or looking at it conversely, he dumbed the language down when he talked to the common people. This was further supported by the fact that, as the statistics proved, he used much shorter words for the plebs.

Anyway, I'm not here to bore you with statistics. What I'm getting to is the fact that this gave me the opportunity to do something very few people can say they have done- I put graphs in a Latin essay. Yes, I took the stats I had gathered, graphed them and included them in the essay.  Because of this, it was one of the most entertaining pieces of work I ever had the opportunity to hand in. I was lucky, in fact, to hand it in on time; I left writing the actual text of the essay rather late- a little too much time on graphs! So, the night before it was due, I finally settled down for an 'all-nighter.' Literally. I finished at 6am, which gave me time for a great 1 hour nap before heading off to university. Somehow I managed to survive the day, but I had no idea what the essay was actually like.

By the time the essays had been marked, it was the exam study break. I went in to collect the essay from the office, not particularly worried what the mark would be. I picked up the paper, walked out and flipped through it. To my great surprised I found that my mark was 28.5 out of 30, and my lecturer had specifically noted how he liked the statistics and the graphs. My natural reaction was to burst out laughing, which was slightly awkward because at that same moment, he happened to come walking past. I made a passing comment about the graphs and he reiterated his interest in it. Once he was out of earshot, I cracked up again.

I've Forgotten What Types Of Graphs These Are...

So what was at first a bit of fun became quite an interesting and revealing academic exercise. In the end, I was just stoked to get such a good mark for something I just didn't feel like doing! It just goes to show, sometimes learning can be fun! But only if you're taking the mickey..!

Q.E.D.