How to write an essay when your partner writes like a confused toddler 👯‍♀️

[Butler]

I have a situation. A situation that is testing my patience, my GPA, and my will to live.

I'm in a partnered essay assignment. You know the kind. "Collaborative writing builds real-world skills." "Learn to work as a team." All that nonsense they put in the syllabus to justify making our lives harder. The essay is worth 40% of our grade, and I got paired with someone I'm going to call "Kevin."

Kevin is... a character. Kevin is the guy who shows up to class 20 minutes late with a Starbucks cup and zero apologies. Kevin is the guy who, in group discussions, says things that are confidently incorrect. Kevin, I have recently discovered, writes at approximately a 7th grade level.

We're supposed to write a 12-page analysis of post-colonial themes in Things Fall Apart. We divided the work. I took the first half of the book; he took the second half. We agreed to share our drafts a week before the deadline so we could merge them and make them cohesive.

Kevin sent me his draft yesterday. I opened the document with hope in my heart. I closed it three minutes later with my soul quietly leaving my body.

Kevin's writing is... how do I put this gently? It's a disaster. It's a beautiful disaster, like a car accident made of words. His sentences are either three lines long with no punctuation, or they're fragments that trail off into nothing. His thesis is "Things Fall Apart is about things falling apart." His evidence is quotes from the book with no analysis attached. He uses phrases like "in my opinion" every other sentence. He spelled the main character's name three different ways: Okonkwo, Okonkwo, and, my personal favorite, Okanakaw.

And now I have a choice. A terrible, no-good, very bad choice.

Option A: I rewrite Kevin's entire section myself. This means I'm effectively writing a 12-page essay on my own, doing double the work, and Kevin gets half the credit. I will be exhausted, resentful, and broke from buying all the caffeine required to make this happen.

Option B: I try to edit Kevin's section, preserving his ideas but fixing the language. This means I have to spend hours deciphering what he was trying to say, untangling his grammatical knots, and essentially performing literary surgery on a patient who's already flatlining.

Option C: I go to the professor, explain the situation, and hope she lets me submit separately or gives me some other accommodation. This feels like tattling. It also risks making Kevin hate me, and we have to present this project together at the end of the semester.

I'm leaning toward Option A, because I'm a control freak and I want a good grade. But my roommate, who has been watching this drama unfold with the detached fascination of someone watching a nature documentary, pointed out something important: "If you do all the work, Kevin learns nothing, and you learn that your time is less valuable than avoiding conflict."

She's right. I hate that she's right, but she's right.

So I'm here, asking the collective wisdom of the internet: how to write an essay when your partner is a liability, not an asset?

I need strategies. I need scripts for the difficult conversation I'm about to have with Kevin. I need to know if I should involve the professor now or try to fix it myself first. I need to know if I'm being unreasonable or if Kevin really is that bad.

For anyone who's survived a nightmare group project, what did you do? What worked? What backfired? How do you balance protecting your grade with not being a total jerk?

 

[Butler]

Butler, I need you to understand something: this is the funniest thing I've read all week, and I'm sorry it's happening to you, but also thank you for the entertainment. "Okanakaw" is going to live in my head rent-free forever. I'm imagining Okonkwo, the tragic hero, being renamed "Okanakaw" and suddenly he's a Hawaiian shirt salesman with a ukulele. You've ruined the novel for me in the best way.

Okay, now that I've gotten that out of my system, let's talk strategy. As someone who writes fiction, I approach problems by imagining alternate endings. Let's play out your options:

Ending A (You rewrite everything): You get an A. You also develop a stress ulcer, lose all your hair, and spend the last month of the semester actively fantasizing about Kevin's demise. You pass Kevin, who learns nothing and will inflict his writing on some other poor soul in another class. The cycle continues. Society slowly crumbles under the weight of unpunished bad writing.

Ending B (You edit his work): You spend 33 hours trying to reverse-engineer meaning from sentences that were never meaningful to begin with. You develop a complicated system of color-coded comments. Kevin ignores them. You cry in the library. The end.

Ending C (Professor intervention): Kevin is mildly annoyed but ultimately fine. Your professor, who has dealt with this before, handles it professionally. You get graded fairly. Kevin either steps up or accepts the consequences. Justice prevails. You sleep at night.

Seems like Ending C is the only one where you don't sacrifice your sanity OR your integrity.

Also, can we talk about how your roommate is a genius? "You learn that your time is less valuable than avoiding conflict" is going on my wall. That woman deserves a medal. Or at least a very nice coffee.

Go to the professor. Save yourself. And please update us on the Okanakaw saga.