Are these supposed to be single sentences?
Semantic satiation, much? 
The first sentence was from the beginning of the student’s essay. Then ellipses, then the last sentence from the essay.
Ok, you gotta do a word count. How many times does some form of the word passion appear in the essay? 
I too used to be passionate about the idea of being passionate, but my passions have dribbled away in other directions, my passions have been subdivided, and now I feel quite dispassionate about passion.
I didn’t, and we’re not allowed to take these home, but next time I will remember to count repeated words.
Department of Redundancy Department calling…
One from the other day:
In the past people used to live in a place full of darkness, where there was no light and you could see absolutely nothing. That is until the light bulb was invented.
Unfamiliar with the story Prometheus?
Now I gotta wonder, with so many electric stoves and flashlights, how many kids have never actually seen an open flame.
Score one more point for Thomas Edison’s ego.
Err … except during daytime. Or when you had your candles, torches, oil lamps, fireplace, or gaslight lit. Or when the moon was full. Or if you had a jar full of fireflies. Or if you lived in the land of the Midnight Sun. Or lived at a seashore that had bioluminescent algae.
Nope. Everything was dark.
EVERYTHING!
Yes, you must remember that everything was in black and white back then. Without light to show the white, everything and everyONE was black.
As a further poitless and pedantic citicism of the author’s scientific knowledge, “full of darkness” is an impossibility. There is only an absense of light, which APPEARS to make things “full” of dark.
What if it were full of endless repeats of the Hawkins brothers?
No, wait, that’d be full of The Darkness.
Are you saying this person is full of ignorance?
YES! Exactly!
Not at all. You simply have to modify the main deflector dish to emit an inverse field of de-photonized tachyons and infuse the subspace matrix ratio converter with a prime frequency modulation.
Shut up, Wesley!
I have assessed your comment and found it to be of the highest value.