Writing Feedback / "Why Mow?" What lawn means in suburban America -> Was I logical enough in criticizing Pollan's work? [3]

In the first paragraph, Pollan explains how there are few fences and hedges in suburban America and therefore lawn plays a role as civil responsibility. At the end of the first paragraph, Pollan makes a bold claim by saying that The American lawn is an egalitarian conceit. This seems to be a far-fetched opinion, so it will be discussed later in this essay.

In the second paragraph, Pollan describes how lawn in America is a symbol of public consensus, then abruptly moves on to a seemingly irrelevant topic of how lawn is detrimental to the environment: Pollan discusses how maintaining lawns requires more pesticide or herbicide than any other crops do. At the end of the second paragraph, Pollan claims that lawns show how skewed the relationship is between the American people and land; people can bend nature to their will.

In the last paragraph, instead of expanding his analysis of the social implications derived from lawns in America, he touches on his personal decision, which was to build a split-rail fence and plant a hedge along it. Then he highlights how doing so will make him free and allow him to do whatever he wants to do with his lawn.

Pollan's work has both weaknesses and strength. The major weaknesses are digression and hyperbole. Pollan's work consists of many sub-topics without proper transition words or phrases. That makes the work look as if it was merely a compilation of writing pieces from different sources. One example can be found in between the second paragraph and the third paragraph. In the second paragraph, Pollan discusses how lawn is the symbol of consensus in suburban America but how growing lawn can be damaging to the environment. Then in the third chapter, he says that he came to a decision to build fences and stop cutting his lawn. To readers, it is unclear how he came to such decision.

Another weakness in the essay was hyperbole. By hyperbole, it means that he made a claim that was rather far-fetched and lacked evidence or reasoning. For example, in the first paragraph, Pollan claims that the American lawn is an egalitarian conceit. Pollan did provide the confused readers with its implication, which was that there is no reason to hide behind the fences because they all were middle class. It is quite unclear how he came to that claim from the fact that there were few fences and hedges in suburban America. The lack of fences and hedges in suburban America could have come from the social trust among neighbors, not from the belief that they were all equal because they came from the same class. In addition, just because some people live in the same neighborhood in a suburban setting does not mean that they are all middle class. To be able to present such a bold claim, Pollan would need more concrete statistical evidence.

Despite the weaknesses presented above, Pollan's essay has its strength in that it could boost people's awareness of how detrimental growing lawn can be to the environment. As presented in the second paragraph, Pollan maintains that people in the suburban America are poisoning themselves by using enormous amount of herbicides and pesticides for maintaining their lawn. The gravity of the situation was further demonstrated by adding on to it the fact that lawns receive more pesticide and herbicide per acre than any crop grown in the country. People who have read Pollan essay will either try to use more organic care products for their lawns or even reconsider the whole idea of growing lawn if they just bought their houses.

In conclusion, Pollan's essay could grow the awareness among people of how growing lawn can be damaging to the environment. In spite of that, in an attempt to do so, Pollan made mistakes of being digressive and making far-fetched and possibly misleading assumptions. To remedy the situation, Pollan could work on adding more transition sentences in between the paragraphs or even within a paragraph so that the flow of logic is continuous. For example, Pollan could excise the last two sentences in the second paragraph; Pollan tries to introduce a new topic, but it is irrelevant to and somehow contradicts the argument presented right before it; if he wanted to introduce a new topic like such, then he should make another paragraph and add more explanations. It would be more logical and seamless to instead discuss how he came to the decision to build fences and hedges and not cut his lawn. Also, as mentioned above, when it comes to making a sharp and rather debatable comment such as the one presented at the end of the first paragraph, Pollan needs to acknowledge that some readers can disagree to such unilateral claim. Hence, Pollan could have paraphrased the last sentence with a more open-ended sentence such as "Some people believe that less of fences or hedges represents the about the same level of economic capability."

Book Reports / "Tender Is the Night" - need to write a deep essay that shows logic and reasoning.. is this enough? [6]

In response to the new novel "Tender Is the Night" written by Scott, Hemingway criticizes Scott for describing Dick and Nicole, the characters that are based on the actual people that both Scott and Hemingway knew, in an unpredictable way. That is, Dick and Nicole were based on Gerald and Sara, but what they did in the novel was not the kind of things that Gerald and Sara would have done in real life. Hemingway also blamed Scott for not being inventive. Hemingway is reprehensible in that he compromised the artistic integrity by making false judgment on Scott's work, that he arbitrarily demarcated the limits of invention and imposed those limits to Scott, and that he used the concept of truth in a self-contradictory way.

To start with, Hemingway was abrupt and officious enough to tell another artist what to do, possibly compromising the integrity of work by the artist. Hemingway boldly wrote to Scott that Scott cannot make Dick and Nicole, the fictional characters in the novel by Scott, do what they you not do. Of course, it is implied that they here were the real life people, Gerald and Sara. The truth here is that even one of the very definitions of novel is to be creative. If there was anything to impose on a writer who is writing a novel, that would be to tell him to be original instead of being hackneyed or banal. Fiction is not like biography, in which it is mandatory to keep everything as truthful as possible. Once a writer starts writing a novel, it is completely the writer's choice to write the work based on the actuality or based on a new circumstances and ideas that he or she had crafted. Therefore, it was over the line for Hemingway to blame Scott's way of writing just because it was different from what Hemingway deemed acceptable; it could greatly harm the integrity of Scott's work.

Additionally, Hemingway's criticism against Scott's work is futile in that his own idea or limits of invention that he wants to impose on Scott is self-contradictory. In the letter, Hemingway scolds Scott by saying that he ought to write, invent, out of what he knows. The truth here is that the very idea of being inventive is derived from the concept of "thinking outside of the box." Hemingway's telling Scott to be inventive and keep the people's antecedents straight is like giving someone A and B and telling that someone to make A, B, and C without even thinking about C. In this case, Scott would have to depict the fictional characters identical to the real life characters, which is quite uninventive per say, but be distinctively inventive simultaneously. Hemingway should have gone over the limits of definition of invention that he had created first so that he could avoid making a self-contradictory claim and forcing it on Scott.

Last but not least, as foreshadowed in the arguments made above, Hemingway is fixated on the idea of making the characters act just as if they were the real people that they were based on. In the middle of the letter, Hemingway encourages Scott to make it all up, so truly that later it will happen that way. For Hemingway's bold suggestions and claims to be even remotely plausible, there is one condition that needs to be met. That condition is that both Hemingway and Scott know about Gerald and Sara to a degree that Hemingway and Scott know what Gerald and Sara want just by looking at their faces. For example, let's assume that Gerald and Sara were invited to a pleasant outing by Hemingway and Scott. They all had good time and of course Gerald and Sara acted in the same way they had done whenever they met Hemingway or Scott. Does that mean that Hemingway and Scott know exactly what they were thinking, exactly what how they behave themselves when they are not with Hemingway or Scott, and what they do when they are by themselves with no one else around? Probably not. What Hemingway and Scott know about them could be only a fragment of superficial facades of them. Henceforth, it would be doubtable, if not ludicrous, for either of them to maintain that they know every bit of Gerald and Sara and that they can expect what Gerald and Sara will do with one hundred percent accuracy.

In conclusion, Hemingway's reaction to Scott's new novel is self-contradictory and myopic in that Hemingway degraded the integrity of Scott's work by telling him what to do, by falsely constructing his own limits of invention and imposing them on Scott and his work, and by simple-mindedly assuming that he knows he is omniscient and knows the inner-selves of Gerald and Sara. Hemingway needs to acknowledge that he should not be pontificate to another artist unless he has a concrete and undeniable reason to do so. He should be able to achieve that goal by respecting others, becoming more reasonable, and by being self-effacing.