INSTRUCTIONS
Here is his final overall comment, but please also refer to the screenshots for more specific feedback on each part of the essay: Hello Sophia,
I’ve just read your final draft of “The Power of what is Left Unsaid“. Your prompt challenged you to write an essay that curiously deepens (creatively explores and explains) an idea you encounter in one of your sources – an article, an essay, and a scene from experience. You had lots of freedom and flexibility in how you approached this exploratory essay, but no matter your path, you needed to hook your reader and yourself with a worthy intellectual problem. You needed to earn your reader’s trust and involvement by introducing and representing your sources, analyzing relevant evidence, and crafting a coherent argument/narrative to arrive at a new extension of the idea you are exploring, a new perspective on your intellectual problem that your reader would not likely reach without reading your essay.
I left lots of marginal comments – both celebrations and challenges – so check those out. And see my broader reflections on your engagements of conventions below:
Establishing and Engaging Sources: I see you making some good attempts to engage this convention in that you spend time engaging three sources, but in the case of all three sources, you are struggling to make key details of sources present for a reader. More detailed evidence and more summary of story/song is needed in your representation of all of those sources. You aren’t yet building a rich world of evidence through the representation of sources and then building your whole essay – intellectual problem, argument, idea – out of your analysis of that evidence. The sources/evidence must be established first! The first task of a revision would be to make MUCH more evidence present on the page for you and a reader to involve yourself in.
Analyzing Evidence: At times you do select compelling evidence but you are showing very little of your logical process of breaking apart and parsing the details of evidence. In a revision I’ll be looking for you to show more of your lingering over the details, approaching the evidence in more than one way and going beneath the surface to get at deeper significance, meaning, or implication of the evidence.
Posing and Engaging a Problem: There is certainly a worthy curiosity that you are writing about in this draft – a range of problems, really, all having something to do with unfinished or fragmented or blurred narratives. However the terms are your intellectual problem needs further defining! There is not yet a clear intellectual problem provoking and inspiring you and your reader early-on in the essay. And so that problem can’t remain as an organizing presence throughout the essay.
Argument/Logic: The essay is as Ozick suggests “a stroll through the essayist’s mind” however, the reader struggles to follow. In this draft your sentences are NOT really “listening” to their neighbors! You’ll see in my marginal notes that a reader sometimes struggles to follow the line of your thinking, even as you are representing sources. And, in an overarching sense, your draft doesn’t yet have an argument that demonstrates how analysis of the evidence leads to a new idea (a new complex perspective on the problem)!
Grade: C (which is not a terrible grade for a first final draft in this workshop)! Let’s have that office hours meeting to discuss revisions. I have no doubt that another round or two of revisions will make a world of difference in this essay.