<p>please give me a grade (1-6) or any suggestions!!</p>
<p>prompt: is it better to be underrated or overrated?
{when people believe you to be a greater person than you really are, it surmounts to pressure put on you that can be burdensome. literary work, such as the scarlet letter and jude the obscure, are examples of how people’s potentials and skills were overestimated, and they thus ended up with deteriorating and hurt souls.}
[arthur dimmesdale was a priest for a very puritanistic town in the novel, the scarlet letter. to the townspeople, he was seen as a godsend, and a holy power to look up to. however, he was struggling with himself because he had been hiding a sinful secret: he had an illegitimate child. he felt like a hypocrite and, more and more, condemned himself as sacreligious. for penitence, Dimmesdale whipped and cut himself every night. finally, during a ceremony in his town, he could no longer forbear the internal strife he had been enduring. before he died, he confessed to the public his sin that mortified the crowd, but lifted a dark, satanic anvil from his soul. because everyone had overestimated Dimmesdale virtue, he created a battle with himself filled with guilt that eventually led to his death.]
[similar to dimmesdales situation was jude fawleys, from hardy’s work, jude the obscure. since jude was young, he had dreamed and imagined of a life filled with scholars, universities, novels, and eager students/ this innate, didactic, and urbane nature jude possessed impressed the rustic people in his town. they all had high expectations for him to over come his impoverished economic state and become a university teacher. however, jude learned that no school would offer him an education for free. so, when jude calculated that, with the job he currently held, he could not even train to become a scholar for several years, he was overcome with a sense of failure. he had failed to make his family and friends proud, and he had failed himself. he became an alcoholic, had unprecedented marriages, was constantly fired from jobs, and was pretty much blacklisted. because his fellow supporters had overrated his potential at success, and had overlooked his uncontrollable circumstances, such as money, jude became someone no one would have been proud of.]</p>
<p>I’m going to comment as I go along. Everything’s looking good until here:</p>
<p>“finally, during a ceremony in his town, he could no longer forbear the internal strife he had been enduring. before he died, he confessed to the public his sin that mortified the crowd, but lifted a dark, satanic anvil from his soul. because everyone had overestimated Dimmesdale virtue, he created a battle with himself filled with guilt that eventually led to his death.”</p>
<p>You stray from your thesis, that it’s better to be underrated(?). This is like a big summary with little analysis. Less summary and more support of your thesis is needed.</p>
<p>Your second body paragraph has a similar problem.</p>
<p>The main problem is that your essay doesn’t really answer the question. The question asks if it is better to be underrated or overrated. Your thesis was that developing a big reputation puts lots of pressure. Okay, so being overrated is bad, but what about underrated? And more importantly, which is better?</p>
<p>You never answered the question. Everything else was fine (although you needed to support your thesis better). Change your thesis so that it answers the question, and change your paragraphs and commentaries to reflect and support that thesis.</p>
<p>I would say the readers would give it a four or a five, depending on the mood they happened to be in. It might not be fantastic for an English class polished proofread essay, but for something written in the 20 minutes allowed it’s pretty well supported. </p>
<p>remember- treat the readers like they’ve got the analytical skills of a human vegetable! Don’t leave them to draw their own conclusions! Your examples are very good but you could be a little less detailed in the summary and spend more words describing how your examples connect to your thesis. A conclusion sentence/paragraph (depending on how much time you have left) can also do wonders for the reader’s impression of your grasp on the question and can bump up a questionable score.</p>
<p>I agree that you need to clearly answer the question, both in your introduction, and again (reworded) in your conclusion.
Also, don’t use big vocabulary words unless you are sure of what they mean and how they are used. The following words (at least) are used inappropriately in this essay: surmounts, priest (isn’t Dimmesdale a Protestant minister?), sacreligious, unprecedented. Also, make sure that you follow proper sentence structure without run-ons and fragements. Finally, don’t end a sentence with a preposition–you end your whole essay with one.</p>