Hi-larious

Why I've pronounced Josef Skvorecky's The Engineer of Human Souls "excellent" after reading three pages:

Irene Svensson therefore produced a new paper and she thought, this time, she had put one over on me. But luck was against her. Having first underestimated my scholarship, she now failed to reckon with Murphy's Law. She bought a ready-written essay from a shady operation calling itself Term Papers Inc. Two years before, they had sold the same paper to a pretty Chinese student from Trinidad by the name of Priscilla Wong Sim, who had turned to Term Papers Inc. at my indirect suggestion -- to pass her with a clear conscience I had to have at least one essay from her in which every second word was not misspelled and there were no such oriental mysteries as "This novel is a novel. It is a great work, for it is written in the form of a book."

As a grad student who reads dozens of undergrad papers a week, I can say that more than one ESL student has inspired similar thoughts.

It can be fun, though, to try to guess the student's native language from the grammatical mistakes in his/her paper. (Hint: If they have this pesky habit of not using articles -- at all -- think of Slavic languages. Except Bulgarian. For some reason it has articles.)