Question:
Some people believe that there should be fixed punishments for each type of crime. Others, however, argue that the circumstances of an individual crime, and the motivation for committing it, should always be taken into account when deciding on the punishment.
Discuss both these views and give your own opinion.
My answer:
There is an obvious statement that criminals must be punished. However, the question about the method of deciding the punishment has raised two different opinions. The first one is that each type of crime has its own unchanged punishment; while the other one takes into account the situations and the reasons of the crime. I will analyze these two ideas and give my opinion.
For the first solution, there is a list of crimes and a list of corresponding punishments. If one person commits a crime, it will be simple to find the consequence of that action. For example, if a man killed a woman, according to this opinion, it is inevitable that there is death punishment for that man. However, because of its simplicity, this death punishment might be not accurate if that man had chronically mental illness and he could not control his action. Consequently, this simple solutions has its own flaws and should be modified.
On the other hand, the second solution considers additional factors of a crime such as the situations and the motivation of an individual crime to conclude the extent of the retribution. As in the previous example, it depends on the way and the reason the man killed his victim, the punishment on him can become more serious or less. For instance, if he did not deliberately killed her, in other words, he killed her by accident, the punishment should be lessened. Because of accuracy, this solution requires more efforts on investigation and is more complicated than the first approach.
In summary, the two opinions have their own advantages and disadvantages. For the sake of justice, my own opinion is that the second argument is more appropriate and accurate than the other one.Holt Educational Consultant - / 14,835 
4783 The problem with your presentation is that you made all of the opinions appear to come from your personal point of view. This discussion format requires you to use group pronouns in the public opinion discussion. Then, you have to use a clear reference to first person pronouns within your point of view. The use of the pronouns will help clarify the discussion and create a coherent move from one opinion to another.
You cannot avoid using pronoun references as these will be scored as a part of your GRA abilities. While others tell you that using pronouns should be avoided at all times, the fact that the pronouns are a part of the general writing rules in the English language and, you are scored on proper grammar rules knowledge and usage makes the use of pronouns vital in this type of discussion.
This should have been a 5 paragraph essay. However, since you seem more comfortable using the 4 paragraph format, you should have presented a longer discussion paragraph as you would have needed to:
- Present a topic sentence referring to the public point of view
- Discuss a reason the public supports this point of view
- Oppose the point of view with a personal opinion
- Given a reason why your opinion is correct
- Use an example to further explain your opinion
- Transition to the next POV discussion
Basically, your paragraph format would go from the 5 sentence presentation to the 6 sentence presentation. You write as much as 8 sentences if necessary, but not more than that. You would risk deviating from the discussion or, you could start to make grammatical and vocabulary errors. The 8 sentence format would be a good format for you to follow if you feel confident in your English vocabulary and writing skills. Writing more in a relevant manner will definitely increase your overall scoring possibility.
