Oleanna Lesson Plan

What does John mean when he asks Carol, speaking of her paper, "What can that mean?"? How does Carol take this? Is she right to interpret this question the way she does? Why or why not?

John means that the statement he quotes from her paper is not particularly concise or illuminating. The sentence itself—"I think that the ideas contained in this work express the author's feelings in a way he intended, based on his results"—does fail to make an argument that is not a truism, or at least relevant to the purposes of an academic paper. However, his way of pointing out the issue with this sentence immediately puts Carol on the defensive, and she concludes, understandably,...