Trudging through something thick and nasty...!

I've spent most of yesterday and today working on my huge anthropology paper. It's basically a compilation of a lot of work I've done over the course of the semester, but honestly it's difficult work. The thing is, my teacher gave me A's on my previous essays and I just can't figure out why. Now that I'm reading through them and tying them all together, I can see that they're horribly organized, horribly written, and not very well thought-out. It's like trudging through something thick and nasty...! I would say they're all C's at very best.

My theory is that the other people in my class must have written essays so abysmally horrific that the teacher had no choice but to use my writing as the "A" standard. Otherwise everyone else would have failed her class! That can be the only explanation for those deceptive A's. There's no way I deserve them.

So what I've been doing all day is going through my essays a paragraph at a time. First I cringe, then look away, and then I try to figure out what I meant to say. Once I've gotten that far, I begin carefully reconstructing and rewording every sentence, sometimes deleting huge passages.

This is no picnic.

I hope that after all this insane work, I'll actually finish by 8 o'clock when the whole thing is due. And maybe the teacher will smile compassionately on my pathetic deluge and give me a passing grade.... (I have NO IDEA if "deluge" can be used in that way, but I'm too exhausted to care!)