kinda happened to me but the rest of the class had D or Fs and I had a C+

If you got a C- for your amazing paper imagine what your peers got.

Take the paper to the person in charge of him.

Some teachers have particular sins that they deduct a lot of credit for. My wife is an English teacher and in her class you lose ten points right off the bat for things like using the pronoun "me" or "you" in an academic paper, and if you're a day late then the max you can score is a 75%. This is all spelled out up front, but it does mean that an otherwise good paper may not score as well as expected.

I'm a pusher katy. I'm a pusher.

How bad were the essays of the rest of the class ?!

teachers seem to always crush kids / students hard work by grading them crap grade because they seem to have a ' entitled ' chip on their shoulder. woukdnt it be easier to help motivate and push our worlds students in wanting to be better then crashing them down all the time!! this happens everywhere. well done on actually submitting and producing a grand essay!!

Your work may have been the best in class but I guess your work wasn't the best he had. Sorry, I tried to make it rhyme. Anyway, your teacher sounds like a d-bag

What's the English department like at your school, and is this a required course for all students, or is this necessary for a major or minor? If it's a general course, there should be department-wide standards as to how essays are assigned and graded, which would give you the ability to talk to the department chair. Granted, I haven't taught in five years, and that was a public college, so take this advice with a grain of salt. If you're majoring in English, this is a requirement for the major, but the course is the pet project of some longstanding, tenured professor who arranges his sabbaticals around this course because he doesn't trust anyone else to teach it properly...sorry, OP, but you're SOL.

I had a professor who failed you on assignments if you had 2 or more grammar errors.