<p>Can somebody please grade my AP Lang essay?
The prompt is to analyze Crevecoeur’s attitude toward Europeans and Americans, concentrating on how his rhetorical strategies reflect his opinions.
At school, I usually get prompts that say to analyze how the author uses rhetorical strategies to convey his/her message, so I didn’t really know what or how I was supposed to do this one. I think it’s pretty bad, but I want to know what grade point an essay like this would receive. Thanks, and here’s my essay.</p>
<p>J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur expresses his positive attitude towards Americans in his piece, Letters from an American Farmer, despite his negative attitude towards the Europeans that actually came to America to become “American”, through his use of rhetorical strategies such as careful diction, repetition, and vivid comparisons.
Crevecoeur calls Europeans who came to America as “[wretches] who [wandered] about, who [worked] and [starved], whose life [was] a continual scene of affliction or pinching penury.” The term “wretch” has a negative connotation, as does the term “pinching”, which gives off a painful image of life in Europe. The repeated use of “who” gives a sense of accumulation, and has the effect of increasing the level of resistance readers would likely feel towards European life.
Contrastingly, Americans and the land of America is portrayed fairly well in Crevecoeur’s description. People previously compared to useless withering plants when they were in Europe, experience a dramatic change in America, as they “[take] root and [flourish]!” This demonstrates Crevecoeur’s surprise at how successful and good America is, and thus his positive attitude towards Americans. He refers to this change as a “surprising metamorphosis”, which again, reflects his positive attitude from the favorable connotation able to be perceived by “metamorphosis” The comparison of the poor to withering plants and citizens to flourishing ones allow the increased awe in the transformation.
As such, Crevecoeur’s positive attitude towards Americans and his rather negative attitude towards Europeans, reflected by the rhetorical strategies he implemented, consisting of diction, parallelism, and metaphor, is exemplified clearly in his piece Letters from an American Farmer (1752).</p>