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."
Holt Educational Consultant - / 14,823 
4781 In the first paragraph, you cannot make a statement and then say that you will discuss it later in the essay. Each comment that you make must be immediately discussed with supporting facts in order to prove the validity of your claim. That is not to say that you cannot circle back later on in the essay, specifically when you reach the concluding statement, and reiterate the claim that you made in the previous paragraphs. Wrap up the review with a solid summary and final opinion of the overall paper.
Since you discussed the essay in chronological order, the given understanding is that you have discussed the essay in a logical manner. After all, you did not deviate from the logical order of discussion as presented by the essay that you read. Therefore, your concern should not be with regards to the logic of your discussion but rather, the validity of the discussion that you are presenting as a criticism of Pollan's work. My opinion is that you have presented an acceptable discussion, when based upon the logical concept. The criticism, could have been better expanded at certain points, but that would actually depend upon the word limit your professor provided at the start of the essay.
