Would you please grade my essay

paying3tuitions
Fri, 09 Mar 2007 03:12:20 +0000

I think if I were one of the scorers, on the scale of 1-6, I’d give you a 3.

Another scorer… I can’t imagine anyone going above a 4 on that essay.

So, I’d say maximum of 7 out of 12.

Suggestions: Don’t start out with Jesus Christ; it is really arbitrary, your timeframe (from Jesus to the Pope) unless maybe there had been a connection between Jesus inventing the soup bowl or the Pope discovering the calculator… anyway, it just clued me in you were pumping up tires with air, there. Set my teeth on edge, y’know what I mean?
So I assumed the Industrial Rev para would be b.s., too…actually when I reread it, there was logic in it and you made 2 good points (deplorable jobs and bad bosses) to prove it wasn’t as good as anticipated when the steam engine made those jobs possible. Your points were buried in all that…“hundreds of factories, thousands of jobs…” I thought, he’s inventing numbers on me now…so I didn’t trust much of your paragraph. When I reread it, I gave you credit for the points made, however, and restored you from the
2 up to a 3 at that moment. (1 is flat-out incoherent; 2 is unworthy of the reader’s time and attention; 3 is kind of average/dull/boring. 4 makes some good points and has a bit of writing flair (which actually you do in places, but not througout…). 5 is sounding like the kid should be reading it to the rest of the class so they’ll learn some new ideas from it, plus it’s well written throughout. 6, I want to send her/him down to read it to the principal and give the principal something new to think about today, then I’m going to mail it out to the New Yorker to see if they want to publish it.)
I thought the calculator was a good, original, clever example to prove your thesis. Overusing the calculator makes your life…what? Remember you are trying to prove the thesis that it makes life easier. It IS easier to use the calculator, but you blasted your own calculator use b/c it makes you mentally lazy, I guess, so I got confused. Is the calc. proving or disproving your opening thesis?
A small thing, but you can learn this right here: Loook at your cal paragraph right now and see that you used 3 different pronouns, “I” through most of it is fine. But in the last sentence you introduced “our” brains and ended with “you might as well lose” and “your brain.” So with 3 different points of view, I felt I was getting confused. Remember you’re trying to write persuasively so stick to one pronoun or point-of-view, stand and deliver!

How can you write with less BS? You do sound more confident with well-chosen personal examples than with history. What is your best academic subject? If it isn’t history, then go elsewhere. You can use examples from science or technology, or the history of scientific invention…if that’s more of a comfort zone for you. So figure on one personal example.


For the second example, maybe you can draw from science/technology, but if not, are you familiar with anything happening in the health, automotive, kitchen/cooking? You could have picked an exmaple for the above prompt from these, for example: the microwave (faster reheats, but no family dinner together to talk things over, everybody running this way and that…); popping diet pills to lose weight instead of exercise and good nutrition; computer components in cars so kids don’t know how to fix their own engines anymore…
Maybe things that come from the life you live around you will feel more real to you and you’ll be able to bring more original ideas and insights to them, as you did nicely on the calculator example.
If you stay in fields where you know things (whether it’s kitchen, cars, I just was picking examples…) you might feel less need to B.S.
The B S factor really jumped out at the scorer, so definitely COOL that down by upgrading confidence in your content/examples.
Can you do it? You can… think about it, anyway.