Any Senior English majors? Grads? Etc.
 

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I'd think a better thing to do is to go directly to your professor. We can only do so much-- she's the one who's giving grades to you, and I doubt *she'd* care that other people on the Internet read your paper!

Don't tell her that you were comparing grades with others, but tell her that you've normally been an A student, so you were shocked to see a grade as low as a C, and would she be willing to meet with you to look over your paper and discuss what you'd need to change to make your next paper a B or A level paper.

That'll do a few things. 1) She may say "I don't give out B papers the first time" or "I never give B's," telling you more about how she grades in general. 2) You'll look good for wanting to know how to make yourself a better writer. (Make it sound like you want her advice on how to write better, not just on how to get an A in *her* specific class.) 3) She may point out things about your paper that you totally missed! I often would read my papers and my points would be filled in by my brain as I read it, but anyone else would be, "huh?" So that may be part of it as well.

As for all of the other A's-- you said yourself that you're not the best writer and that you're a history major. It may be that the A students are mostly upper level English majors who have written papers on "A Modest Proposal" before... I wrote one my senior year of high school, and again my freshman year of college, so if you're an English wonk it's easy to crank it out...