image source: http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/

Dearest seniors,

As you work through all those intellectual and logistical hurdles of thesis chapter drafts, remember the words your third-grade teacher would chant before every spelling test: “Put your name at the top of the page.” Below is an email sent out to English seniors after one hurried (or humble?) (or ashamed?) senior submitted a nameless thesis chapter to the department:

Subject: Draft

Someone dropped off a 20-page thesis draft w/o a name.  It is titled “The Blood Cycle.”   Who are you?

Best, Marcia

It seems Princeton won’t let this thesis exist among its peers—Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, A Woman in Berlin—as an authorless document. Keep chipping away at those pages, thesis fairy. You won’t walk out of the gates without a name. But if you slip some thesis pages under my pillow, I won’t ask questions.