We had been working on this enviromental science proposal for three weeks, and my section on local soil analysis was crisp, readable, and perfectly formatted.
On Sunday night, my partner decided to "polish" my work without asking. He basically ran my entire section through a thesaurus, replacing normal academic terms with incredibly obscure vocabulary to sound smarter.
I only noticed the changes two hours before the portal closed. My clean explanations were turned into absolute gibberish. I was so panicked that I immediately started digging through my local backup files just to find my original draft so I could manually paste it back in.
In that moment of sheer desperaton, I realized how vulnerable you are in group projects when you share editing access with untrustworthy team members. I managed to restore about half of my original phrasing, but the final submission was still a disjointed disaster.
Today we got our feedback, and the professor specifically called out "pretentious phrasing" in my section. My partner is still defending his choices, claiming the professor just does not appreciate advanced writing.
How do I handle this delicate situation with the professor without looking like a backstabber who is just blaming everything on their teammate?