Poetry / Poetry project, 8 different types of poetry [9]

Wow, you're really good at this. It is difficult to find anything to criticize. I'd say maybe you could do a bit more with the concrete poem. You have a couple of neat line breaks, but you could certainly move things about to create more obviously concrete visual effects.

Book Reports / Comparison Essay: Killers in The Green Mile vs. the Killers In Cold Blood [4]

I've read the Green Mile, but not Cold Blood. I don't know any killers, either, so I can't really say if King's characters are realistic in that sense. I can say, though, that King is great at characterization, and that I found his characters believable. He provides background information that gives his characters a texture lacking in most horror novels. Bear in mind that King's characters don't have to be exactly like the ones in Cold Blood to be realistic -- people are very different from one another, and I imagine that killers differ a lot from one another too. So, you can argue that they are realistic (your thesis) as long as you have enough points of comparison to back it up. So, if you can find three points of similarity, you're good to go, even if there are also clear differences.

Essays / In general, how to write a term paper? [15]

A term paper for what course? On what topic? Give us some more details to work with.

Undergraduate / Transferring from Wright College to Rockford College [3]

Yes, you want to revise this essay to make sure you give a better impression of yourself. At the moment, you admit to being a poor student and a quitter -- hardly the qualities admissions officers look for in a prospective student. Focus the essay entirely on your job, and how you needed the money, but it ate into your study time, and caused family problems, which made focusing on academics even more difficult, etc. You were a victim of circumstance, of the harsh financial realities that many families cannot avoid. The goal here isn't to honestly admit your flaws, but to spin a story that will cause the admissions people to agree to overlook hard evidence that you probably aren't the best student, namely your transcripts. So, you need to appeal to their compassion.

Undergraduate / Transfering from UTD to UT Austin - Statement of Purpose [11]

Okay, your first draft is already pretty good. You have an inspirational story to tell. Now, can you tie it more closely to you academic goals, or to your desire to transfer to UTA? If I'm reading this as a UTA staff member, I am likely to be impressed by your personal struggles, but a bit confused as to what they have to do with your decision to transfer. So, you want to keep the story but add details that make it relevant to your audience.

Essays / Thesis Statement about the most influential people in your life [3]

You might add some specific details. So, "My father, my mother, and my brother have each influenced me in important ways, by teaching me self-reliance, compassion, and cruelty respectively." You should replace the exact qualities with ones of your own, of course, but this should give you a decent model to work with.

Writing Feedback / We can know something about a person by the way he dresses. [18]

Your first reason is okay. Certainly, people who are really rich generally dress to look it. I'd argue that the upper middle class, though, especially those born into it, tend not to go for the expensive brands, at least not as adults. They're smart enough to know that buying brands is poor value. It tends to be the lower middle class who buys them, because they can just about afford to, and want to look more well-off than they are. Still, your general point is sound.

The same cannot be said of second point. Gacy often wore business suits, and was indeed taken for a gentleman. Of course, he kept the bodies of teenage boys he'd raped and murdered under his basement floor. On the other hand, I've known many goths who dress "freaky," yet who were souls of kindness and compassion. As for people who do drugs looking disheveled, I've found that the better dressed a person is, the higher class of drugs (i.e. harder and more illegal) he is likely to do. So, I'd say your second body paragraph needs some revision. At the moment, most of what you say is just demonstrably wrong.

Perhaps you could revise both body paragraphs to provide specific details about elements of dress that might reveal something about a person? So, someone in an Armani suit is clearly very well-off, for instance. Whereas, someone in ripped jeans might be poor, or could simply be someone better off who is on a day off. Being more specific would allow you to add more depth to your analysis, which, as noted above, is a bit superficial in places.

Writing Feedback / The Death Penalty is more costly than imprisoning someone for life [4]

Also, if you are going to make the case that the death penalty does not deter crime, you are going to have to look at how it has been implemented in other countries, not just the States. I read somewhere that the death penalty works very well as a deterrent, if two conditions are met.

1. The death penalty has to be unavoidable
2. The death penalty has to be carried out in timely fashion

Neither of these conditions obtains in the U.S. People can generally plea-bargain their way out of a death penalty, or show enough signs of remorse that the jury won't go for a capital sentence. Even if a person lands on death row, he has plenty of appeals, and can often delay his execution by years, if not decades. In countries where the death penalty is the standard sentence for a crime, and is carried out after only a single appeal, crime rates tend to be dramatically lower.

The same is true for costs, btw. The death penalty is way cheaper than life imprisonment in countries that truly embrace it. Only in the U.S., where the death penalty is implemented only after years of appeals, is it more expensive that life imprisonment.

A last point to consider: In Going Postal by Terry Pratchett, the hangman tells the protagonist that, while he has no proof that the death penalty lowers crime rates, he believes it probably is an effective deterrent, because, as he puts it: "I've never seen anyone come through here twice."

All of this is not to say that you can't argue against the death penalty. I don't agree with it myself, as a matter of fact. But, you need to address these arguments if you want your essay to be convincing.

Writing Feedback / " Rising divorce rate"- Cause and effect essay [9]

Alternatively, for your third reason, you could talk about the effect of media portrayals of romance, which show people who fall in love for life. Of course, people fall in love, in the romantic, blind, unreasoning, passionate sense, for about four years, the average length of time it takes to have a child and get it to the point where it can follow its mother about on its own. After that, a relationship has to be based on a different type of love, or else end. And to continue it requires a fair amount of hard work, as the people involved no longer have the blinding effects of love to help them overlook each other's flaws. Most people aren't taught this, though. They are taught that true love lasts for ever, that meaningful relationships can be struck up in an instant and maintained simply and easily by following their hearts. That has never been true, but imagine how difficult it must be for a married couple who suddenly discover that the nature of their relationship has changed to cope without any preparation. This is unfortunate, because marriage is a valuable social institution. Coming from a single parent household is more predictive of crime rates than either race or socioeconomic status, though there is a fair amount of overlap between those three factors.

Writing Feedback / Does Success Come from Luck or Work? [7]

You still need a clear thesis. You can side with hard work, or with luck, or you can argue that you need both. But whatever you choose, make sure you state upfront, in your intro, what your position is, and then tie all of your paragraphs back to that point. So, in this case, you might start out by saying

"Both luck and hard work play a role in being successful."

Then, you could write a paragraph discussing why luck is important, another discussing how hard work is important, then come up with a conclusion in which you explain just how luck and hard work are related.

As for being afraid of the essay, these sorts of essays are extremely formulaic, and tend to center around the same set of general themes. With a bit of practice, you will have no trouble learning to write these well in under 30min. Try revising this one, then take a shot at another prompt and post it in a new thread for more feedback.

Research Papers / 10-15 page research paper on History of Capital Punishment [7]

Okay, then. There are plenty of online sites that will give you the correct formatting for parenthetical references and for the works cited page for MLA citation style. Also, if you are using the latest version of MS Word, you can autoformat your citations, which saves some time.

Research Papers / Drinking age, lowering age to 18 - research paper [21]


Excellently written! I can see the depression oozing blackly out around your punctuation marks. :-)

Undergraduate / 'in love with the stage' - Common App--Elaborate an Activity [13]

"I have fallen in love with the stage since I was 13." Revise to either "I have been in love with the stage since I was 13." or "I fell in love with the stage when I was 13."

Hmmmm . . . you are trying to cover too much. Don't give an overview of your entire history with the theater. Pick one portion of that history that you discuss in detail. So, you might focus on directing your first play, or acting in a particular role. That will allow you to use this essay to make a point about yourself, to demonstrate that you possess some quality that makes you a good applicant. Good luck with your second draft.

Research Papers / WWII Paper - Hitler Expansion [6]

Winston Churchill -- he was the main reason WWII wasn't won by Germany. When all of Europe was overrun, America still held herself aloof, and England herself was being bombed daily, he refused to surrender. There has been a ton of material written about him, so you should have no trouble find research sources for more info.

FDR -- he brought America into the war. I seem to remember reading somewhere that he had provided covert support to Britain for a while, and was actually eager to join the fight against Hitler, even though he campaigned in favor of keeping American out of the war. He just couldn't summon up enough public support for involving America until Pearl Harbor. It's been awhile since I studied this, though, so I could be mistaken.

Good luck

Book Reports / Comparison Essay: Killers in The Green Mile vs. the Killers In Cold Blood [4]

What exactly do you want help with here? You have pretty clear instructions. So, start writing your essay, get a draft done, and post it here for feedback.

Poetry / Poetry project, 8 different types of poetry [9]

They look pretty good to me. You seem to have a strong sense of what each poem should do. What are the other 5 types you need to work on?

Writing Feedback / Career, exploration, travel, home - check these paragaphs [11]

These sorts of exercises are useful for teaching you about the basic intro and conclusion structures. Once you have your thesis and your main points, there is no reason you shouldn't be able to pound out a standard intro and conclusion for just about any essay. The only problem is that the standard, formulaic intros and conclusions tend to be fairly subpar. I once had a professor who asked the class not to bother writing a conclusion at all if it was just going to be the standard one they had learned in high school. As he put it, "I'm a pretty smart guy -- I can remember what you said three paragraphs ago. Please don't make me read a paragraph that doesn't say anything new. If each of you does that, I have to read thirty paragraphs of useless material before I can finish marking. I don't have time for that." So, do the assignment, get a good mark, but remember that it is an exercise for beginners, similar to a typing exercise in which you only use the home keys. No one who learns to type expects to be limited to the home keys for long, nor should you expect to be limited to formulaic intros and conclusions for long, either.

Writing Feedback / The Effects of Violent Movies [9]

If you are just doing this for practice, why not pick a topic you are really enthused about? Writing on relatively random topics that don't seem to mean much to you isn't a great way to improve your writing. Find something that you really want to say, that you feel you need to say, and start there.

Research Papers / Drinking age, lowering age to 18 - research paper [21]

Ah! I see. For you the driving age is 18, so making the drinking age 18 too seems foolish. I didn't realize that -- here the driving age is 16, the drinking age 19, so there is already a three-year gap between when people start driving and when they can start legally drinking, which is the same gap you'd get with 18 and 21. I had assumed that 16 was the driving age where you were, too. I guess Canadians are just naturally more mature than Americans. Come to think of it, that explains a lot about our respective cultures :-).

Writing Feedback / GED Practice essay: Do you think stronger laws should be enacted to... [4]

I'd give this one a four. There are some minor grammatical and stylistic issues, but they do not detract from the clarity of your essay. You deal with both sides of the debate before coming down in favor of a side, showing thoughtfulness and balance in your approach. Your second-to-last paragraph could be a bit longer, and go into more detail, but, given the time constraints, this is understandable. Good job.

Graduate / Essay for MSc in Finance [4]

You have a lot of specific detail, which is good. Here are some suggestions for improving your work:

"Graduated of a Master of Financial Engineering of university X, I am submitting to you my application" Obviously you are submitting an application. Why not just write "I hold a Master's of Financial Engineering from Uni. X"?

"This job specification is what you decide to do with" Not sure what you mean here. Are you trying to say that the job is whatever you make of it?

"I have performed a lot a research on the internet, and talked with many traders, to learn how I can add a great value to my profile; my research has encouraged me to pursue a Finance Msc, especially yours, and also recommended me for theses masters.at your institution "

Writing Feedback / Essay about war and religoion during 1990s in Europe-Balkan [4]

You need a clear thesis for this essay. What exactly is your main point? Are you writing about the dangers of religion in general? About the specific causes of the war you reference? Try to capture your main point in a single sentence that you can put at the start of your essay. Then, make sure that everything you write in your essay can be tied back to that main point, supporting it in some way.

You should also probably avoid including statements that involve sweeping generalizations about groups of people. So, "the not Christian, the bad Christian, and the good Christian. The not Christian people and the bad Christian people were probably one of those kinds of people who caused problems through history in the Balkan region." seems a tad one-sided, for instance.

Undergraduate / Arts and Festival DVD recording. Common app - elaborate one activity (150 words). [2]

"After the school Arts Festival closing, I suggested engaging in a research study" Who did you suggest this to?

"All the studio earnings should be used to subsidize poor students."

"the school gave us big hands to our program's publicity" This is confusing. Do you mean that the school contributed greatly to the program's publicity ?

You might want to add in a few more specific details, if you can find the room for them. So, who did you suggest your ideas to? How did the school help win publicity for the program? What was your role in the program? etc.

Research Papers / 10-15 page research paper on History of Capital Punishment [7]


Google, the all-knowing overmind, will tell you. It's just a method of citing your sources. Some citation styles use footnotes or endnotes, but most use parenthetical references, or at least give you the option of using them. Unfortunately, this means you will need to check with your teacher to see which style you are supposed to be using -- MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, etc. Then, once you know what style you need to use, Google it to find out the correct format.


That would work, and make it easy for the reader to follow your essay.


Well, usually you would still argue something; you would just argue it with only reference to research sources, instead of injecting your own personal opinions in to the essay. Check out: esc.edu/htmlpages/writerold/menud.htm for more details. If you absolutely aren't allowed to do that, though, you could always craft a research question. So, start out with a question that you hope to answer through your research instead of a thesis. Then, in your conclusion, you simply have to write down your answer based upon the research you did. So, think of what your thesis would be if you were allowed to have one, then turn it into a question in the intro, essentially.

Book Reports / The Crashing Symbols of The Glass Menagerie and My Little Town [27]

That's much better. I like the anaphora -- it creates a nice rhythm. It also completely solves the issue you were having with conflating the song and play. Great job.

Faq, Help / Question about EssayForum - How does this site work? [105]

If you post your essay here, then yes, other members and the moderators will post comments on it. You are not allowed, though, to simply post your work in other people's threads -- you must start your own. The general rule is that each new work needs its own thread. You can earn the right to start new threads by leaving helpful comments on other people's work. Every two comments left gives you the ability to create one new thread.

Essays / Mary Louise Pratt, "Arts of the Contact Zone" [4]

A good start. Some tips:

"The island of Guam is a small island, and they have many different cultures from Americans." Do they? Or do they have one culture that is different in many respects from that of America?

"In America they had many cliques ."

The part you have left off is the most important -- what did you learn from this experience?

Undergraduate / 'Off of an auto-pilot' - Bentley University Transfer Essay [6]

Also, why do you want to transfer to Bentley specifically? I'm sure there are many, many universities with friendly students and engaged teachers, and I am certain that every applicant to every university would be willing to claim that on their applications, whether it is true of the university or not. So, you need to come up with something more specific, something that you couldn't write for any other college application. And, as Kevin says, you also need to deal with what you will bring to the campus. Again, be specific, and, as much as possible, unique.

Writing Feedback / Art Paper - Elizabeth Murray [4]

Is this supposed to be a straight out biography? If so, you have done a good job. If not, you might want to say something about her influence on artistic trends, so that you can craft an arguable thesis. What were the exact instructions you were given for the assignment?

Writing Feedback / Suxanne - a story about one of my dreams [3]

Wow, your opening imagery is graphic and gripping. Great job. If you want to make your story even stronger, try expanding on it. Specifically, you need to do two things.

1. Develop the characters more. For a story to be effective, the reader has to care about the characters, which means he has to be able to picture them and empathize with them. This is difficult to do in your story at the moment. We don't know, for instance, why Suxanne has an affair, or why she chose Harry, or for that matter how the narrator could so easily respond to the situation by committing murder. So, you need to show the characters going about their daily lives before you introduce the extraordinary events, so that when the extraordinary events happen, we care about the characters they are happening to. Which leads, conveniently, to

2. Build suspense. The narrator starts off in a cell. He finds out his beloved is having an affair. He kills the man she was having it with. This is a summary of your story. There is nothing in-between that has been cut out. To build suspense, you need to slow the tempo down a bit. The plot is going to be predictable no matter what, but you can still engage the reader by making him wait and wonder about the details -- how is the narrator going to get revenge? If you don't mention at the beginning that the narrator doesn't kill Suxanne, then you also have the question of who he kills.

Book Reports / The Crashing Symbols of The Glass Menagerie and My Little Town [27]

"Both play and song combined show Tom's depiction of his father through religious symbolism in his physical absence and spiritual presence. Both associate Amanda with themes of escape and contempt" I thought you had agreed that the song wasn't about the play? If so, I think what you mean here is that both song and play capture the same themes. The song, like Tom's depiction of his father, shows the emptiness left by a missing family member. Or something along those lines.

Research Papers / Drinking age, lowering age to 18 - research paper [21]

If random Google web pages are to be believed, roughly 50,000 people a year die in car accidents in America. Around 8000 of those fatalities are caused by drunk driving. Put another way, 42,000 approximately, are caused by sober driving. Now, admittedly, this is not to say that drinking improves one's chances of avoiding an accident -- presumably far more people drive sober than drive drunk, so drunk driving could still increase one's chances of having an accident. However, given the high number of traffic fatalities that occur even without alcohol, I would say that banning cars, or else dramatically increasing the driving age, would be a better solution than increasing the drinking age.

BTW, I wanted to compared traffic deaths world-wide to alcohol-related deaths, but finding reliable statistics on the latter proved difficult. Most of the studies done are carried out by groups that frown on drinking to begin with, so they count any and all deaths in which alcohol was involved, without really looking to see if alcohol played a causal role in the death. So, one study, for instance, included homicides carried out by people who have been drinking, which seems specious -- after all, if I were decide to kill another person in cold blood, I'd probably take a stiff drink or two beforehand to steady my nerves. That is, the decision to commit murder could as easily cause people to drink as the other way around. Likewise, the studies tend to include every death from every disease for which alcohol ups the risk factor, though obviously many of the people who suffered from them would have become ill anyway, because the vast majority of those illnesses have causes other than alcohol.

Undergraduate / An Essay on university admission -UG (myself, family, school interests) [9]

Well, you already seem to have made a lot of progress on this essay, but there is still room for improvement. Be careful of your word choice and sentence structure. Sometimes you use a word that is slightly off, or else structure your sentences in such a way that you end up saying something you don't really mean. For example

"I run an outfit where I instill my ambition and constant drive to make a difference by starting a company." Instill doesn't really make sense here. You instill something into someone or something else. So, "I wish to start a company where I can instill my sense of ambition into eager new employees," or some such, would work.

"A well rounded education in Business is something that I genuinely desire to impart on to myself." If you can impart the education to yourself, why do you want to attend university?

"I believe this attitude of open minded thinking is something that I am proud of" You believe that you are proud of it? You don't know for certain?

These are fairly minor errors, but cumulatively they weaken your essay, so you should probably go through and revise them.

Undergraduate / I left Hong Kong in 2007 and became a student at Bowling Green State University in Ohio - common app [11]

Wow, great essay overall. Here are a few minor fixes and suggestions:

"Since then I have begun to develop a keen interest in business administration."

"but also because of its resources such as the research centers and institutes"

'At last, NU would be the college of my desirability " This phrasing is awkward. Reword.

Writing Feedback / Does Success Come from Luck or Work? [7]

Hmmm . . . you start off arguing in favor of luck, but by the end you are putting a fair amount of emphasis on hard work, too. It's okay to say that you need both, of course, but I think you should make sure to state that, the amount of work being equal, people with the good fortune to be born with certain advantages will do better than those who do not have those advantages.

Essays / General biological science, Statement of purpose [8]

Sure enough, these forums are all about helping students learn to write their own essays. If the moderators wrote your essay for you, it would subvert that purpose. Write up a draft of your own, incorporating the points you list, then post it here. We can then make helpful suggestions and correct grammatical mistakes so that you can revise it until you are satisfied with it.

Writing Feedback / The Effects of Violent Movies [9]

Sameed pretty much hit the nail on its head with his comment. An essay usually has multiple paragraphs. These paragraphs often contain citations drawing on empirical studies that back up your claims. They also often deal with opposing arguments by explaining why those arguments are wrong or irrelevant. Also, why are you writing this? Is it for practice, for class, or for some other reason? If for class, what are the requirements?

Writing Feedback / What is the major benefit of an international cooperation? Correct my essay [4]

Aside from the grammatical issues, your essay suffers from a lack of clarity about just what you mean by international cooperation. I would have thought that, without any other context given, it referred to cooperation among nations; that is, cooperation between national governments. What does this have to do with corporations, whether they devote themselves to protecting the environment or ravage it for profits? Your third paragraph seems to deal more with the advantages and disadvantages of globalization, which is a related concept to be sure, but not the one you are supposed to be discussing. So, to improve, I would suggest you do two things. First, define "international cooperation" in your introduction. Second, give specific examples of governments (or corporations, or NGOs, or whatever entities you set yourself up to discuss when you defined international cooperation) that have cooperated with each other. This should ground your essay and give it a clear and focused argument. Then post your revised draft here for grammatical feedback.

Book Reports / The Crashing Symbols of The Glass Menagerie and My Little Town [27]

Wow! Someone still believes in intentionality when it comes to interpreting texts. Hallelujah and praise the Lord! But . . . arrgh . . . as much as I agree . . . I . . . urgh . . . can't resist playing devil's advocate . . . so . . .

Try searching Google" for "intentional fallacy" in order to familiarize yourself with the latest literary theories (i.e. those after developed sometime after the 20th Century) and throw off your anachronistic, and probably patriarchal and oppressive, Victorian mindset. Good grief, who really believes that texts have individual authors in any meaningful sense anymore?

:-)

Grammar, Usage / Can I get away with recycling an old paper for a new assignment? [9]

To answer the question you originally posed, the answer is yes, probably. If you posted the essay online somewhere, then it might get flagged as plagiarized. If you never published it or posted it online somewhere, though, then it is extremely unlikely that your professor would ever know that you had recycled an old paper. Thus, you could "get away with it," in the sense of not getting caught cheating, which, by the way, is how the professor would see it if you did get caught.

However, as Kevin said, that would defeat the point of college. Also, I strongly suspect that the topic you have to write on now is a bit different from the one you wrote in high school. I would bet money that the professor has much higher expectations for it. So, recycling your old papers is not going to be a good way to get high academic marks, and it will prevent you from learning anything, which is the whole point of going to college. Which goes to prove, I think, that no one ever really gets away with anything. The consequences of poor choices may not always be immediately obvious, but there are always consequences, and they always catch up to you.