Opinion Essay: Volunteer Work Graduating Requirements

Question:

Some high schools have a requirement that students must complete a certain amount of volunteer work in order to graduate.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS TYPE OF REQUIREMENT?

Give details to support your opinion.

My Essay:

Being a student with a requirement like that, I strongly disagree with the idea of putting it into one of the graduation limitations. The original meaning of this was to help the student develop better and cultivate the sense of volunteering. Nevertheless, the meaning of volunteer work has completely altered after implementing the graduating requirement.

From my perspective, the definition of volunteer work is an act of dedication to the community or society wholeheartedly without asking for any reward, thus it cannot be quantified. Once doing so, some students will complete the minimum amount of volunteer work with a hasty and rash attitude, and they just regard it as a chore. To them, volunteer work is more like a task than an act inspired by the inner heart, and it defies the original meaning of volunteer work. Moreover, the quality of work done by volunteer workers is also declined because of the above-mentioned attitude among students.

On the other hand, volunteer work seems to be unrelated to a person's academic achievements, which made the restrictions unreasonable. Students may lose their diplomas just because of their insufficient volunteer work "scores", which hinders them from applying to universities.

In conclusion, the implementation has defied the meaning of volunteer work radically, and it completely undermines the quality of volunteer work. Without the limitation, students can devote themselves to what they love more, while those who have fond of helping others can do volunteer work more wholeheartedly. For these reasons, I think the minimum requirement for volunteer work should be lifted.

--Hope to hear from some review about structures and sentence improvements. Thanks in advance!

Here are some of my opinion about your essay:
- In Introduction part: I think you should refer the idea by paraphrase the question rather than "Being a student with a requirement like that"
- In your Body paragraphs I can not identify your topic sentences, I think you should plan before start writing your essay

Are you writing this for a TOEFL or IELTS Test? You have not created a proper representation of the discussion requirement for either format. You do not have a subject in the first sentence before you present your response. To be clear, there is no clarity to the following presentation:


- What requirement? Remember in the IELTS test, you need to present a topic restatement. In a TOEFL test, you need to at least mention the topic within your direct response to the question. Without it, the presentation doesn't make any sense. Since you have a topic sentence in the second half of the presentation, you should have started with that first, or immediately presented that information first. Again, the presentation format will depend on the type of English test you are taking. Do not confuse the IELTS and TOEFL writing tasks. Though they have the same topics at times, the discussion presentations are highly different in format and scoring criteria.