Think about your audience:

In any piece of writing, you should ask who your readers are, and shape material accordingly. In the case of papers for REL 1300, your reader is me. So, what is the point of this comment?

Among these deities ten of them are feminine figures. And I would very much like to talk about all of them, but I would not like to bore you so I will just talk about the two that I found most interesting...

This implies that the student writing the paper is very interested in Hindu goddesses. Unfortunately, the reader, that is me, the teacher, is likely to be bored by the subject. So, the helpful student does not write about too many goddesses.
Of course, there is an element of pretense in essays you write for a class like this. Your essays will be read by me, and I probably know more about the subject than you do - and yet I insist on your including facts and references that I already know. That's the nature of the exercise - you are writing for an imagined audience. The type of writing we are engaged in is academic writing, so you should imagine an academic audience - readers who will not complain about being given too much information, who will not be bored, and who do not need to be entertained. You will be judged by results, not by statements of enthusiasm like the following:

Hinduism, in my opinion, is one of the most complex religions in the world if not the most. Even though it's complex, it's still interesting to learn and understand about Hindu believes beliefs and deities. Through this paper I've understood why worship to of goddesses is an essential aspect for some people in this religion.

Of course, I hope you find the material in this class interesting. I also know that the chances are some of you will not - sometimes in university, you have to struggle to do well in classes you find boring, for some people that might be a physics class, for some of you it might be this one. I won't grade you down if you look bored, and I won't give you a higher grade for telling me that you find the subject interesting. Also, it isn't really your job to tell me that you understood the material. When I read your conclusion, that should demonstrate to me that you have reached a good understanding, because it should be an insightful comment about the material. Concluding your paper with the comment that you understood the material well is like telling everyone that the song you composed is really good: let them listen and decide for themselves.

Talking of decisions, here is one of the highlights of this set of papers:

Researching Sri Laksmi will likely unveil different conclusions about her origins. Kinsley's and Coburn's opinions about her nature are examples of such conflicting remarks: while the former implies she may have "derived from an Indo-European goddess"⁴ the latter believes that she is "a pre-Aryan goddess of fertility."<sup>5

4</sup>David Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses, Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, pp.19 and 32.
⁵Thomas Coburn, Encountering the Goddess: a translation of the Devi Mahatmya and a study of it's interpretation, Albany, N.Y., State University of New York Press, 1991, p.18

The student has read two secondary sources, and read them carefully enough to spot a disagreement. This demonstrates that he understands that pre-Aryan goddesses cannot be Indo-European. Some students, if they read both of these sources, would have copied them both faithfully, telling me that Sri-Laksmi came from a pre-Aryan Indo-European tradition.

Back to REL 1300.