If these are the points that leap to your mind, they will leap to everyone else's too, and whether you get a "C" or a "D" may depend on whether the instructor reads your paper early when he is fresh and tolerant or late
I don't think this is true. If a teacher asks 100 students for a paper on an assigned topic, they're not looking for originality. They just want to see if you can write or not. I always had felt that I should write something original and was worried constantly that I was re-hashing an idea the teacher had already seen dozens of times. But then I asked several teachers about it and they said they weren't looking for originality. After all you can't expect thousands of students of the same age in the same class at the same school with the same teacher to think very differently from one another.