Student essay

[Marissa Muñoz]

Hi I'm Marissa this is my essay about school uniforms.
I would like feedback on my overall essay and my introduction
Also I would like to know how it sounds and how it flows =]
thanks! =)

[Kathleen Edgar]

Hi Marissa,

I enjoyed reading your essay.

I liked the way you were able to mix your own experiences with your research. This made it more personable.

I was able to read it through easily without having to stop to reread for clarity. It seems to flows well.

Thank you for sharing,

Kathleen

[Sharon K. Miller]

Kathleen's comment about how using personal experiences to illlustrate your research makes it more personalble is an excellent point. A good balance between your outside resources and your personal experiences always makes an essay more readable.

[Marissa Muñoz]

Thank you very much for the comment Kathleen!
I really appreciate your feedback!!
I'm glad that you enjoyed reading it =]
Marissa

[Victoria Davis]

I loved your comment that "A child’s intelligence is not measured by the clothes they wear, but by their commitment and attitude towards their school work. There will always be the students that perform well in school and there will always be the students that slack off. How can clothes possibly determine how a child is going to do in school?" This was a strong statement and powerful enough to convince me. However, some of your replies to the opinions on the websites are purely emotional. You need to respond with more facts to counter their arguments. You need to organize your arguments to match the order you have them in your thesis. More clearly stating your points at the beginning of each paragraph will help you to do this.
However, I do have to say that this is a very sophisticated response to the issue. I have seen a lot of very emotional arguments made against uniforms by my own students. You present your case in a very mature way, using the evidence effectively. Good work. Sincerely, Mrs. Davis

[Sharon K. Miller]

I agree with Mrs. Davis that it would be very effective to organize your arguments according to the order you put them in your thesis statement.

[Marissa Muñoz]

thank you very much for the comment! i will take that to mind! =]

[Sharon K. Miller]

Marissa,
I enjoyed reading your essay, and I think you make some excellent points in support of your contention that school uniforms inhibit uniqueness. In the first full paragraph on page 2, when you declare that "the next writers, artists, inventors, politicians, actors, designers, and musicians are developed" in school, it specifically addresses the uniqueness and the creativity of people who go into these fields, and supports your thesis pretty well. I did experience a little confusion as a reader, though, when I got to the sentence, "That prerogative is approved to mishandle its virtue and deprive our constitutional right to free speech and expression." I found myself going back and re-reading tha sentence multiple times to try to figure out what you were saying. This, then, is a sentence that interferes with the "sound" and "flow" of the essay, which you wanted feedback on. I think my problem here was not quite knowing what you mean by "that prerogative," what it specifically refers to in the previous sentence. Perhaps you see a student's right to "creativity" as a prerogative, but it isn't clear in the way it's written, since the prerogative is "approved to mishandle its virtue." I think you will see why it becomes a little confusing there; I'm sure you can elaborate on it and make it much more clear for your reader.

On the whole, I find your essay quite readable. Thanks for helping Ms. Taylor share the use of a Ning for student feedback.

[Victoria Davis]

Sharon,
I like how you honed in on something specific, but you spent a lot of time on it. I don't know that I would have that much time to spend on one issue in a paper with my schedule and number of papers to grade. I do agree that the confusion with that sentence really comes from her using words to impress, rather than mean.

Tori

[Sharon K. Miller]

You are right that I honed in on something very specific, but it's something that I have long practiced in terms of feedback to students. As a rule, I give them very specific comments on a single aspect of their writing and then encourage them to independently find other places in the work where there is a similar problem to overcome. The goal is to focus on a specific area to spend time on and then use the improvement there as a model for improving elsewhere in the paper. I always worried that my students would not spend adequate time on revising carefully.

[Taylor Johnson]

Sharon,
Hi, I had the same trouble with that almost gorgeous sentence you pointed out starting with "That prerogative", and I wanted to understand it also but couldn't. I hope Marissa can break down her ideas a little more so that what she is explaining there can come through.

I was also was drawn to her arguments about uniqueness, and more than anything was really pleased to see a student defending the creativity of those careers. We really need our students to be creative individuals in the coming century, as so many of the problems we will face as a world will require creativity, divergent thinking, and new ideas...but as I already pointed out in my reply to Marissa, I think she needs to work on the logic of her arguments so that her readers won't get confused. I think that a quote from a source that proves that schools who use school uniforms are interested in squelching creativity would really help her argument. Otherwise, it will come across as purely emotional, something that Victoria pointed out above in her reply as well.

Taylor

[Marissa Muñoz]

Thanks so much i really appreciate it! and thank you for specifically telling me my errors so next time i know what to work on.I can see the confusion you had with that sentence. its clear to me now, thanks again!

[Taylor Johnson]

Hi, Marissa!

I really have enjoyed reading and rereading your essay. I am struck by all the excellent changes you have already made to this draft from the earlier drafts I saw. For instance, you added concessions to the beginnings of most of your body paragraphs, which I believe really help with the flow of ideas expressed in your essay.
However, as I continue to reread, I get stopped up in a few places where it seems like your logical explanation or flow from one idea to the next seems to be incomplete. It's an interesting problem because overall, your essay is so confident and carefully constructed, but nonetheless I feel like there are a few gaps in logic or thinking among ideas. It's like you're making bigger leaps than I am prepared to follow, and there are all these questions that form in my mind as I try to make the leap in logic with you, and those questions or confusions are significant enough that I'm not sure I am totally convinced at the end of the essay. I am reading rather critically here, and my goal is to help you strengthen your logical thought process put into writing more than it is to critique things like sentence or spelling errors...so I hope you understand that when I say you need to work on some of these logical problems, it is said with great respect for your written achievement here. You use great vocabulary, have very few grammatical errors, and your topic sentences, thesis statement, and overall organization is excellent.

Here's where I would go back and reconsider...in your first body paragraph, you claim that schools that require uniforms are restricting freedom, and then your example is about girls using their freedom to wear makeup and shorten skirts. So how, logically, have you proved your point with this example? Now, that being said, I think your instinct is good, it's just a matter of including more of the details in your thinking so that your reader is unable to poke any holes in your ideas as you move from point A to point B in the argument. In other words, try to flesh out all the steps in your thinking.

Similar problems in this same vein arise in your other body paragraphs as well. I am happy to point them out to you during a class conference in person, but see if you can find them first, yourself.

I am proud of your achievement in this essay and think you are well on your way to being an excellent writer and clear, logical thinker.

Thanks, Marissa! Have a good weekend....;)

Ms. J