WASHINGTON, DC – Complaining about the ‘poor-quality’ and ‘substandard’ opinion pieces submitted to newspapers by female lieutenants who have washed out of Infantry Officers Course, Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos has announced that all future iterations of the course will now include an op-ed writing workshop.

Dubbed “First to Write,” the workshop will start as a trial program at IOC before eventually moving to The Basic School and Officer Candidate School. It will augment the Mothers of America writing classes, available to recruits in boot camp, who are encouraged to talk about their foul-mouthed homophobic drill instructors.

Amos made his decision after reading an essay by 2nd Lt. Sage Santangelo that was recently published in the Washington Post. In her essay, she wrote about failing infantry training because she was perceived as weaker than her fellow male lieutenants and reasoned that publicly whining to the commandant would fix this perception.

Santangelo, currently deployed to Afghanistan, has already written a follow-up opinion piece in Quetta’s Daily Mashriq newspaper asking the Taliban not to attack her unit because unequal standards had not allowed it to prepare for battle as much as other units.

According to aides, the general was extremely upset by the poor grammar and sentence structure he saw throughout both of Santangelo’s articles.

“From her needlessly flowery opening paragraphs to her frequent use of the passive voice, this is not the sort of essay I would expect to see from one of my lance corporals, let alone a second lieutenant,” Amos later explained in an interview.

“Whether [Santangelo] failed because the Corps didn’t adequately prepare her, the course was too hard, or because we happen to live in an misogynistic phallocentric society, she should be able to properly complain in a format of 1000 words or less.”

Amos has also released a White Letter encouraging all lieutenants to focus more on writing and less on physical fitness.

It reads in part: “Marines have always been known for their unique writing style, ever since Franklin Wharton first put quill to parchment to pen his famous essay ‘On the Role of Improper Shaving and Non-Regulation Pantaloons in the Defeat at Bladensburg.’ Our lieutenants need to be able to bring their weeks or even months of experience to the table, and carry on that tradition before the Corps loses its reputation as a bastion of intellectual discourse.”

“At home and abroad, Marines should always be able to write concisely and directly to the American public about how nothing is ever their fault.”

In an unrelated story, the commandant announced that he would not be overturning the decision to separate an active-duty major who recently wrote an inflammatory opinion piece demanding the impeachment of several senior politicians for the “senseless bloodbaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

When asked to elaborate on his decision, Amos threatened to fire the reporter.