Writing Feedback / Help rewriting Lead paragraph and Conclusion - Computer History Paper [12]

"Basically, I'm telling a chronologically arranged story starting from Ed Robert's Altair until the release of Windows 95." Your thesis would be the reason you are telling the story. That is, why should your readers care? What does the story show us about the evolution of the computer?

Essays / An argumentative essay on Louis Riel: hero or villain? [11]

Your first paragraph could in fact be mostly cut altogether. Try to avoid stating generalities that don't advance your thesis.

When you are discussing the rebellions, focus more on who he targeted, what tactics he used, that sort of thing. The difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist generally lies in those things.

Good luck coming up with a complete draft.

Writing Feedback / The first time i crossed the road by myself [5]

This is really quite good. A few minor grammatical things:

"I went to kitchen to beg my mom for money to buy some ice-cream"

"I can give you ." Avoid chatroom-ese in your essays!

"I tightened my fist around my money"

""Did you just buy them from there?"

Undergraduate / Common app Short Answer (cyber competition) [17]

Do you have another activity you can use? While Starcraft is a great game, and I agree that playing it does everything you say it does, many people are still biased against videogaming as a waste of time. While standing up for your beliefs is always good, you might want to go with something that you don't have to explain quite so much given the word limit.

Writing Feedback / Help rewriting Lead paragraph and Conclusion - Computer History Paper [12]

Writing both the introduction and conclusion last is a great idea. In fact, if you are writing a research paper, you might want to start out with key quotations from your sources, then arrange them in the order you intend to use them. This gives you an outline for your body paragraphs, which tend to take very little time to write once you know what evidence you are using to make your points. Then, once you see what you points are, you can come up with a thesis that ties them together.

Writing Feedback / Living a simple but meaningful life is a lifestyle which you must choose. [7]

Yes, your style is good, and there's not much wrong with your grammar, either. As for how it was written, if you were only trying to express heartfelt emotions, then you did a great job. I assumed you were writing for a specific audience, though, namely either a teacher or a professor, and they tend to like clearly laid out logical arguments, so if you are going to be submitting this for a grade in a class of some sort, you might want to consider making the revisions I suggested.

Book Reports / Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in "The Blue Hotel" [19]

I'm looking forward to reading it. The outline seems promising, as it is very detailed, with a clear focus on a specific and interesting thesis.

Undergraduate / "successful artist" - The University of Texas at Austin [11]

Solid essay overall, though more specific details about yourself wouldn't hurt, as Angela suggested. A few minor grammatical fixes:

"It was a challenging and beneficial experience to start in an unfamiliar environment. "

"I have a more extensive history of employment than most college students, which has helped develop my sense of dedication, pride, stability and responsibility."

"and will always keep in mind the impact that UT has had on me"

Essays / Letter to a friend - a photograph of an important school occasion [7]

Bear in mind that werewolves, ghosts, and various other forms of undead and demonic spirits share the vampire's habit of not showing up in pictures or mirrors. Unless your area has recently had a rash of deaths attributed to either anemia or to severe blood loss, you should avoid jumping to conclusions about the nature of your friend. That said, your friend is almost certainly a manifestation of supernatural evil that would view your knowledge of his true nature as a threat, so you probably don't want to write to that particular friend about this incident. You should probably write to some one you trust who seems unlikely to have fallen under the influence of whatever your friend actually is, preferably someone who has access to sharp, edged weapons: decapitation is an effective method of dispatching most corporeal undead (and most living things, too, for that matter), though of course it does nothing against incorporeal spirits and certain varieties of zombie.

Good luck.

Scholarship / Scholarship Essay - degree vs a positive contribution to society [5]

Hmmmm . . . I'd say you need to decide what sort of doctor you want to be, and focus your essay on that. For instance, "I would love to help research and contribute to find a cure for cancer" implies that you want to be a medical researcher. However, "I wish to one day provide high-quality care from a quality education in order to take care of my patients" implies something more like a general practitioner. The focus on saving lives of individual patients might imply that you wanted to be some sort of surgeon. It is not unusual for students entering their undergrad to not know exactly what they want to focus in, but the essay would be stronger if you just wrote as if you had settled on just one area of specialization. It's not like the essay is a binding contract that will prevent you from following a different course of study if you change your mind later on.

Writing Feedback / Essay on describing a scene in my life (that last time i saw my friends) [7]

Great essay. A couple of minor fixes:

" . . . soon the flash back started." Flashbacks are a cinematic technique, not an actual psychological occurrence. Use different phrasing here, for instance "My mind drifted back to when . . . "

"The doorbell rang."

Undergraduate / 'The Lord spoke to me' - UW transfer personal statement [5]

" . . . we still stuck together and kept moving forward." Maintain tense consistency.

"My parent's dreams of having an education . . ."

"I decided to step it up." This is a bit informal, given the tone of the rest of the essay.

Overall, I'd say you should probably go into a bit more detail about why exactly you want to study visual design. At the moment, the essay isn't that personal or specific, except at the beginning. In fact, if you took out the word "Vietnamese" and the references to the Lord, you'd have a fairly generic essay that just about any student could have written. However, you want to stand out, so, you need to talk about how important visual design is to you personally, preferably employing specific anecdotes to prove your point.

Writing Feedback / "I was running" essay. Grammar and punctuation help. [7]

"With every crazy beat of my heart the black curtain in front of my eyes strengthened"

Um, the essay seems a tad incomplete. Also, it seems more like a work of fiction at the moment. Could you provide the details of the assignment instructions?

Book Reports / Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in "The Blue Hotel" [19]

"Whisky" is the original spelling of the Gaelilc word that gave us the term, but is generally now considered a variant spelling mostly used to describe Scottish and Canadian brands, with "whiskey" otherwise being preferred.

Research Papers / Research paper on Commercials on TV (ideas). [12]

What do you want to say about junk food ads aimed at children? That they are well-designed according to strict ethical rules? That could be a thesis statement. That they help children to make informed decisions about what to eat? That could be a thesis statement. That they use techniques designed to appeal as much to the reason of parents as to the emotions of children. That could be a thesis statement.

Of course, the opposite of all the above suggestions could also be thesis statements . . .

Scholarship / Scholarship Personal Statement (my dream of becoming a doctor) [9]

All of the section reproduced below is off-topic:

"I have always worked hard at everything I have done whether it be getting an A in a college level class or smiling at every customer I encounter at my cashier job at The Fresh Market and I believe my hard work will pay off. I am naturally a very competitive person and can not help my tendency to want to overachieve. I have taken some of the most challenging classes at my school, become an active member of the Center of International Studies Magnet, and achieved Historian of the National Honor Society."

Ideally, you will have covered this material in another essay as part of your scholarship application. If not, you will need to tie this material in to the benefits you hope to gain from the scholarship. So, you might talk about how you have always worked hard, but that you believe it would be easier to focus on your studies if you were not forced to work your way through university. And so on.

Writing Feedback / Living a simple but meaningful life is a lifestyle which you must choose. [7]

You have a paragraph composed mostly of questions, none of which are really rhetorical. In fact, you overuse semi-rhetorical questions throughout the essay. You might end up with a more convincing essay if you stopped to answer some of these questions.

Really, the essay needs restructuring. First, you seem to be starting from the premise that most people in today's society are dissatisfied with their lives, and/or view their lives as meaningless. What evidence do you have for this? Consider the statistics at harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=796 which show that 94% of Americans report being satisfied with their lives. It is an often noted paradox of American culture that the vast majority of people in America (and, to a lesser extent, other Western nations) report both being satisfied with their own lives while simultaneously believing that most of the people around them are not. This may have something to do with the fact that most of the 6% who are dissatisfied with their lives tend to be found in places such as Hollywood and the media. The reasons for this are a matter of fierce debate, but one explanation that I've heard posits that most ordinary people work hard and earn about as much as their work deserves, and so take satisfaction in their money. But, in Hollywood, you get people earning millions of dollars for doing a job that really isn't worth that much (Any given movie, for instance, is worth about $12 to any single person. Actors make so much money only by selling that $12 performance over and over again to millions of people. As a result, Hollywood tends to produce many movies critical of the pursuit of wealth, because the people living their can take no satisfaction in earning far more than their efforts are worth. In any event, if you are going to write an essay about how to remedy the malaise felt by people in a consumer society, you must first establish that such malaise exists, or else choose a different thesis.

Next, you start to talk about what we have to do to live a meaningful life. None of what you mention really has anything to do with that, though. You talk about maintain good health, but many people have found meaning in undertaking dangerous endeavors that risk injury. Virtually any Olympic athlete, for instance, punishes his body so much in his youth that he guarantees health problems for himself in middle age. Likewise, you talk about avoiding people who drag us down, but many people have found meaning in trying to help such people improve their lives. All you are really describing is what most people need to be content. This has very little to do with meaning.

This post is already getting kinda long, so I'll stop here, but hopefully you get the point -- you need to think out the logic of your argument a lot more for your second draft.

Essays / Close Reading of Othello [4]

"This passage occurs shortly before the death of Othello"

"From reading This passage, I have found two significances, which areadvances the plot and develops the charactersdevelopment, refer to the whole play."

You should probably quote more from the passage. In fact, for a close reading, you would probably want to quote a line, explain it, quote the next line, and so on.

Are you sure that the passage isn't written in something close to blank verse? If all of the lines have roughly the same number of syllables (ten or eleven) it probably isn't prose. If the meter deviates from iambic pentameter in many places, that is likely done to create certain poetic effects, rather than to avoid being poetic at all.

Undergraduate / 'level of programming' - Personal essay for transfer admission to the University of Pittsburgh [4]

If the instructions don't say anything about the formatting, then Times New Roman, 12pt font, doubled spaced is the academic standard. As for what you have written, it is decent grammatically and stylistically, but I'd add more about the reason why you want to attend the University of Pittsburgh, specifically, as opposed to, say, any one of the dozens of other universities in America that also offer the degree you are applying to.

Writing Feedback / Short Essay on Modern day televison watching. [5]

Well, think about how the different technologies affect each other. For instance, are DVRs and Netflix both part of move away from television viewing in the traditional sense, in which people sit down at predetermined times to watch predetermined shows littered with ads. Or is it the case that people will now demand to be able watch what they want, when then want, without having their program interrupted by commercials trying to sell them stuff they don't want? Can HDTV been seen as an attempt to counter this by adding value to television's main product? IF you can find some ways in which your points are connected, then writing the transitions becomes relatively easy.

Undergraduate / Background, interests, personal and professional accomplishments [5]

Great essay. I love the strong anecdote you use to begin it. This sentence is a bit wordy, though "While wondering around the house dazed one day, I overhead someone making a comment about how it was such a pity that my sister who was exceedingly bright and whom who my younger brother and I looked up to was gone leaving me as the older sister to which my younger brother would look up to and what a poor example my brother had to look up to." If you could shorten this, or revise it into several shorter sentences, your essay would be even better than it currently is.

Writing Feedback / Essay on theories as to why one might be service orientated and others not. [2]

You might want to discuss what you mean by service-oriented a bit more. For instance, would you consider someone who helps others because he believes it is the right thing to do be equivalent to someone who helps others because he believes it will win him more friends and influence among his peers? On the flip side, would someone who doesn't help others because he is too shy to volunteer be equivalent to someone who doesn't help others because he believes the weak should be allowed to perish? How would you classify a highly paid doctor? On the one hand, his job consists of helping people, perhaps even of routinely saving lives if he is a specialist. On the other hand, he's getting paid for it, so his motives aren't necessarily particularly altruistic. He is more helpful than the school janitor only by virtue of having a more socially valuable skill set, not by virtue of having a different personality type.

All of the above boils down to the idea that you should always define your key terms in your introduction when writing an essay like this. After all, until you have decided what it means to be service oriented, how can you figure out what makes a person service oriented?

Writing Feedback / Kouzes and Posner's practices within a leadership event. [3]

The essay seems on-topic to me. If the "five main practices" you mention in the intro have sub-steps, as you to imply, you might want to explain those steps, or at least outline them, in your introduction too. Good luck finishing this essay.

Essays / Victor Catala/ Caterina Albert, 'Solitude' Models of Masculinity [5]

The question sort of implies that the text contains more than one model of masculinity. So, if there are characters from different classes, ethnic groups, religious affiliations, etc., perhaps some of them subscribe to different views of what it means to be masculine. If so, you could compare and contrast them. Also, does what it means to be masculine change for the same character depending upon what situation he is in? So, is a man trying to be masculine when hanging out with the guys acting differently than he would if he were trying to be masculine hanging out with his girlfriend. If so, what does this imply about the nature of masculinity? I haven't read the text, so these are just guesses as to the approaches you could take, but they seem to be the most likely ones, based on the question.

Writing Feedback / All About Me, A COMPILATION OF MY THOUGHTS [4]

Hmmmm . . . it's difficult to criticize an essay entitled "All about me, A compilation of my thoughts." I mean, really, if what you wrote is what you were thinking as you considered the topic, then you are pretty much bound to be right, content-wise. Your style and grammar are solid, too, so there's not much left to talk about. The only thing I can think of is that you belabor the "I don't like writing about myself" point, which, after the first time you mention it, becomes a bit of a distraction.

Writing Feedback / Short Essay on Modern day televison watching. [5]

"Watching television is a cultural practice of people in today's modern society"

"hard-to-please couch potato."

"you would begin the excruciating task of programming the VCR. Accomplishing this amazing headache inducing feat required a degree in Sony-ology" Excellent job!

Overall this essay is well-written. You may want to work on tying everything together a bit more, transition-wise. You go from talking about DVRs, to Netflix, to HDTV, which are all new developments in television-related technologies, but which you could presumably discuss in any order. So, if you could come up with a justification for discussing them in the order you choose, or draw attention to some connections between them, that would help. You could also mention services like bittorrent, which allow you to download any episode of any popular television series to watch, without ads, whenever you like, for free, unless you are trying to avoid including legally questionable services in your essay.

Writing Feedback / Help rewriting Lead paragraph and Conclusion - Computer History Paper [12]

Between the introduction and the conclusion falls the body. At least, it does normally. You seem to be missing the bulk of your paper. I know you only asked for help with the intro and conclusion, but really, they should be judged in context.

"The PC gave rise to the dot com boom and without that...well who knows?" Um, you list a bunch of positives, then end with this, which, given the way it ended, was more of a negative. Was that intentional?

Overall the paragraphs seem solid.

Writing Feedback / Supposedly we, young people, are no longer interested in religion, and thus losing belief in God. [5]

To stay on topic, you might want to deal with the issue of belief. People who really believe in religion attend Church or its equivalent, because most religions posit some sort of Hell or other negative consequences in the afterlife for those who do not follow religious precepts. So, if young people are "too busy" to attend Church, then it implies they are unbelievers, or at least people who only believe weakly. Why do you think that is? Do you think it is a good thing or a bad thing, or do you find it a matter of utter indifference? Etc.

Book Reports / Synthesis Essay on To Kill A Mockingbird and Brave New World [2]

Were those texts assigned to you, or can you choose other ones. Because To Kill a Mockingbird and Brave New World don't naturally go together. If you have to use those particular texts, though, you might want to ask yourself what they do have in common, and start from there. As I recall, a fair amount of Brave New World deals with the way society has been engineered, and how that social engineering affects the people in it. Now, are there ways in which the society of To Kill a Mockingbird has been engineered (say, with social attitudes about race). Does that affect people in the novel too? Are there parallels that could be drawn here? Also, Bernard starts out as an eccentric and ends as an outcast, trying to stand up to a society that ultimately proves more powerful than he does. Does Atticus stand up to society in some way? Does society prove more powerful than he does? What else to the struggles of the two characters have in common?

Hope this helps in coming up with your thesis.

Graduate / SOP for Graduate Admission: computers and business [4]

Overall, this is fairly solidly written. Some minor fixes:

"to choose computer sciences as areas of higher study.

"I started concentrating on the concepts and software that support it."

"Most importantly that can improve the design and architecture of the software more efficient and sophisticated." Not much about this sentence makes sense. Revise.

Essays / Is there a wrong way to start a narrative essay? [14]

Hmmmm . . . I guess that "Hooray!" does come off as somewhat sarcastic. Sorry 'bout that. My point was that, while your gaining more confidence is a good thing, it would be more effective if you showed us your becoming more confident instead of merely stating that you did so.

Book Reports / Portray the universe of meaning within which Hagar lives her life; The Stone Angel essay [11]

Concerning the original assignment, don't forget to include any symbols from the book that might have been mentioned by the teacher in your class.

Essays / Is there a wrong way to start a narrative essay? [14]

"In the past, I would do nothing just to avoid the feeling of failure; in my mind, everybody was better than I was." This is a good problem for you to write about. I imagine most people have felt like this at some point in their lives, so your readers will be able to relate.

"The fear of standing up for me is how I reached the title of self-represented litigant, "Pro Se" according to the law. In the beginning, I hired a 300.00 dollar an hour attorney who was going to save the day." This requires back story. Why were you hiring an attorney? The reader can make some guesses as to the general reasons based on later details, but it would help if you supplied some background upfront. If the background is too personal to share in the essay, feel free to alter the details, or even to make up a completely fictional back story. But add something.

"The old ways of siting back and allowing things to happen to me was gone. Instead, the new way of making things happen for me is here to stay." Hooray! The problem, though, is that you are merely telling us this instead of showing it. Narrative essays should be all about showing. Imagine that you are reading this essay as someone else, someone who doesn't know you or your background. When reading it, what reason does the reader have to empathize with you? To want to see you get a favorable verdict from the judge? To understand how powerfully the experience affected you?

Graduate / Drawing a blank on Essay prompt (is there an outline?) [4]

"I want to go to the school because it has a stellar reputation in my concentration area, and I need a change of environment" These are excellent reasons for wanting to go the school you are applying to. For the first reason, you would want to talk about how, exactly, the reputation is stellar. What about the university makes it really good, in your eyes? For the second reason, focus more on why your university's environment in particular would be better than your current one, rather than just talking about why you need a change (which you could get no matter which university you went to).

Grammar, Usage / APA formatting - Review Essay [17]

You can find plenty of guides on the various citation styles on-line. This site library.concordia.ca/help/howto/apa.php is particularly useful.

Graduate / nursing graduation admission - professional goals essay [6]

In that case, go into as much detail as you can about what your professional goals are, and how you expect your degree to help you attain those goals.

Graduate / Formatting, Approach, and References in Graduate Admissions Application [3]

Once you have the basic elements of your response in the right order, though, there is no reason you can't flesh out the essay by adding in connections between those elements. In fact, that would probably make your essay more interesting.

Graduate / nursing graduation admission - professional goals essay [6]

Also, what word count do have to work with? If the essay has to be very short, then you probably just want to outline your expected career path. If the essay is meant to be quite long, then you'll probably have delve more into how you expect your education to prepare you for that career.

Writing Feedback / "The Great Gatsby is seen in two ways" - Help with Essay Writing - [10]

For the first essay, the numbering of your points is unnecessary. Also, pick one theme and discuss it exclusively throughout your essay. I'd go with the idea of the corruption of the American dream. What exactly is the American dream? You say it is corrupted, but how, exactly? You might want to consider that the Declaration of Independence talks about how people have "the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Perhaps the problem is not that the dream has become corrupt, but that one of the weaknesses of allowing everyone to pursue their own happiness is that not everyone is capable of recognizing what will make them happy. Some, like Gatsby, may even make their happiness contingent on something he can never have. This might point the way to a more detailed analysis of the theme you say you will focus most on.