1.
Brad --
First of all, I really liked your topic and all of the
ideas that you presented in your paper. Your ideas were interesting and the
overall structure of your paper worked well. The two things I would suggest
focusing on are the concreteness of your writing and the transitions between
ideas. Sometimes your writing is a little vague, and other times the
transitions are quite abrupt. But if you do some editing, I think your paper
will be great! Here are some other things I noticed:
-- “By being interested in so many different types of
music made in such far-reaching locales, I have really expanded my world-view.
The music that I listen to has taught me about so many diverse cultures and
ideas, that I credit it with a large part of my adolescent education. Music has
formed who I am.”
Could you expand on this idea if it’s important for the
rest of your paper? I can understand the
part about an expanded world view (though there is room to elaborate), but the
ideas of your “adolescent education” and that music has formed who you are a
little more vague. I thought both ideas were interesting though, so can you
explain them a little more fully?
-- “…the ridiculous amount of
concerts…”
Would “number of” sound better?
-- I really liked your analogy between a good album and a
good education, but can you smooth the transition between “the big picture” and “In music…” because it seems like a little bit
of a break
-- Do you think the ideas in the two paragraphs starting
“While I am hoping to approach education…” and ending “…lungs to take the song
even higher” would fit better where you talk about how music has shaped you?
-- “I want to dole out the
culture and happiness and introspection and love that music provides.” The
first image that came to my mind with the phrase “dole out” was Oliver Twist
and the other orphans getting dollops of disgusting oatmeal! I think you could
strengthen that sentence a lot if you used a different verb. “Share” might work.
Or even something more emphatic than that.
-- The paragraph “But what horn…” is -- like
the music-shaping-you-as-a-person paragraph -- interesting but vague. See if
you can make it a little more concrete
-- I liked the idea of a play list to go with your paper,
but can you make the connection between the songs and the sections of your
paper more apparent? Obviously, at this point, the titles reflect the general
idea of the paragraph, but I’m sure that you, as a music aficionado, can make
the music reflect your ideas in other ways.
Original
sentence: By being interested in so many different types of music made in such
far-reaching locales, I have really expanded my world-view.
Revised sentence: My interest in a wide variety of music
from across the globe has greatly expanded my world-view.
So overall, good job. And your paper inspired me – I
definitely put The Life Pursuit on
when I started editing!
Megan
2.
Alex --
Hey, I enjoyed reading your paper! The way you developed
your paper on two levels, the unconscious passion and the conscious
goal-making, was interesting and effective. I think your tone also worked well,
because it was conversational, as a paper about personal things has to be, but
not too informal. I think once you link things together more clearly, your
paper will be in great shape.
And on to the bulleted list of
suggestions. Ok, a lot of these are about persnickety details, but details are important
right?
-- The part where you talk about collective unconscious
and onward seemed to me to be a little less clear and not as well connected as
the beginning of the paper. The ideas were all interesting -- I liked the
multiple facets of your personality especially -- but I got a little lost.
-- It might be cool to flesh out the juxtaposition between
your unconscious and conscious decisions a little bit more. I don’t know if it
was the main thrust of your paper, but it could be an interesting way to
develop the structure.
-- "spending time with my family is a <b>rare
occurrence</b>, which can be both a blessing and a curse. During one of
those <b>rare occurrences</b>..."
-- "motivate their child in their academic
endeavors" Would “her academic” sound better?
-- A thesis-y bit might be helpful, and it would be easy
enough to change this sentence "It was true; as far as I can
remember..." to include something about the consistency of your underlying
passion for helping people, regardless of your recent reconsideration about
your major. Does that kind of make sense? That will help give your paper an
immediate framework without too much rearranging I think.
-- In the paragraph that starts "In junior and early
high school..." a topic sentence would help unify your paragraph.
Something along the lines of "my underlying desire to help others has had
a huge influence on the activities I participate in" (though I’m sure you
can come up with something sexier than that). Two more things about that
paragraph: I think it would help to keep everything chronological, so move the
part about your elementary school volunteering to the beginning of the
paragraph, and I also think you can combine the following paragraph about
college activities with this paragraph. Just use this paragraph to talk about
all of your activities, from elementary school through now
-- "Ironically, or perhaps coincidentally, what -- at
least, I believe -- got me into Plan II at UT was my college essay on
passion." So wordy! :) "I’m sure that this passion (but a less
redundant word for passion) helped me get into Plan II. In my essays, I wrote
about..."
-- "I have been questioning..." becomes "I
have begun questioning that decision, and -- more unsettling than that -- the
dream behind it."
Original sentence: While school is still my priority, I
find these activities are extensions of my unconscious in a way as to enable me
to hold onto my passion to serve.
Revised Sentence: Though school is still my priority,
these activities serve as a way for me to ____ * my unconscious desire to help
others.
*Stretch/develop/use/foster/channel -- I’m having trouble
coming up with an appropriate word here. I want to explain using your
unconscious desire like you would explain using and exercising a muscle so it
doesn’t get weak. Maybe this will be easier to explain in person.
Overall, a good job!
Megan
3.
Prianka –
I really enjoyed reading your paper and I definitely got a
sense of how important soccer is to you through your vivid descriptions of the
game. The main thing I think you could work on is the unity of your paper. A
lot of the paragraphs seemed like very separate, unconnected ideas, both with
each other and to your idea of passion over all. I think it would help to make
the organization and structure of your paper more obvious. All of your ideas
are there, but I think they would be much stronger if they were more connected.
Stuff like topic paragraphs, more smooth transitions, and tying the individual
paragraphs and ideas more directly to your passion would be easy enough to add
and they would really help to unify your paper.
-- Could you combine the first two paragraphs? They both
seem like introductions and I think it would stronger just to have one at the
beginning.
-- The idea about sometimes not comprehending your
feelings until you play is interesting, but a little vague. Can you elaborate
on how getting into the zone of soccer helps you with that?
-- It would help to relate your emotions to your passion
more directly. It’s fine to state that emotions help
make soccer your passion, and then explain your emotions (you did a great job,
I could really feel them), but you also have to link it back. Why is it that
these emotions are so important to you, to the point that they make soccer your
passion?
-- I like that you start your paper with the beginning of
a game and come to a conclusion as the game ends. However, the conclusion
paragraph seems unconnected to the general body of your paper. I think the
framework you’ve set up could be really effective if you could somehow bring
all or many of the ideas you’ve introduced in your paper into your concluding
paragraph.
Original sentence: It helps
relieve all my aggression, anger, frustration, and even exhibits my happiness
and energy.
Revised sentence: It gives me both an outlet
to release my anger and frustration and a way to express my happiness and
energy.
Hope this was somewhat helpful!
Megan
4.
Amanda –
I really enjoyed reading your paper! I liked the way you
set up the progression of your passion -- it definitely made your paper
interesting to read.
A few suggestions, some more detail-oriented than others:
-- Your writing seems a little wordy at times. At this
point, this is probably the least of your worries, but if you find yourself
with some extra time you might want to edit for it. I definitely have trouble with
it, and so sometimes I just edit for wordiness. I read through and ask myself
what exactly I’m trying to say in a certain sentence, and how I could say it in
another, more concise way.
-- "It would take a few more years for me to realize
that I had a gift – and even a passion -- for teaching." Would "I had
a passion, perhaps even a gift, for teaching" sound better? I think that
order sounds a little more natural, what do you think?
-- "...former teacher confronted me." Confronted sounds a little aggressive. Would "approached"
work better?
-- I think it might help to make the shift in you attitude
towards teaching (the tutoring paragraph) more obvious. On the first read, the
idea sounded very similar to what you’d discussed in the previous paragraph. If
you can really emphasize a change in the way you viewed teaching -- from
something you did because you felt your teachers weren't doing a good job (kind
of thing, this being the previous paragraph) to something you truly enjoyed
doing -- I think it would really help the structure and development of your
paper. Underscore your discovery!
-- Can you use the band paragraph to expand your idea of
your passion (you in the past/in the context of your paper/the story you’re
telling) in a different way? Can you build off of your previous understandings
of your passion and present a new interpretation here? Otherwise, it sounds a
little like the same idea as the tutoring paragraph, in a different context.
That’s fine, I just think you could strengthen your paper a lot if you used it
as a way of exploring your understanding of your passion in a different way.
Original sentence: I still insisted to myself that a
career in educating would drive both me and my students insane, but I
nevertheless took some small steps towards becoming a teacher in my every-day
actions, even if not by my profession.
Revised sentence: I took some small steps towards becoming
a teacher in my everyday life, though I still didn't consider it a possible
career.
Great job!
Megan
5.
Liz --
I really liked the way you used something more abstract
and general as your passion. It’s a lot harder to explain clearly, but I also
think for most of us something general like your passion of love is much closer
to what we’re passionate about. It manifests itself in a bunch of different
things and makes it that much harder to pin down. I think our passions are very
similar in many ways actually, so I was really inspired by your paper!
Because I really enjoyed your paper and the ideas in it,
and you asked for suggestions for unifying, I basically wrote you a mini-novel
of suggestions. This is not to say that your paper was bad, at all, because it
wasn't! I just got so excited by your ideas and the different ways I saw your
paper developing! So hopefully some of this is helpful.
Perhaps an idea that you can center your paper around is
that of connecting with other people. That's a lot of what love is, a strong
feeling of mutual connection and understanding with another person, right?
Arguably, poetry and beauty are also forms of connection, since what makes them so powerful is the way they resonate with us and
the way we understand them. Could you use your introductory paragraph to talk
about your passion in general, and then use poetry, fashion, and
photography/graphic design to illuminate it?
The way I understand the organization of your paper right
now is something like this:
- Intro
– love is what you’re passionate about
- Here
are some things where you manifest this passion and why they are important
to you
- Poetry.
Important because:
i.
Reading
it helps you feel a sense of connection and understanding (you’re on the
receiving end)
ii.
Writing
helps you share that feeling with other people/connect more deeply with other
people (now you’re the one giving)
- Beauty
(though isn’t poetry a kind of beauty? Do you want to emphasize visual
beauty here?). This is the part where you talk about fashion and graphic
design. Important to you because:
i.
Seeing/experiencing/creating
beauty is exhilarating. Same sort of connection/resonance that you feel with
poetry?
ii.
By
creating beautiful things (clothing, images), you share your feeling/connection
with other people
- How
you can bring your passion to a career
- Connecting
with people
- Creativity
Here are a few ways I think you could rearrange things just
a little bit to make the whole more unified:
- Introduction
- Love
-- To me, your passion seems to be more about connection and
understanding than what most people would consider love. Though I can see
how all of your ideas are related, you might be building up too many
layers for your reader to keep up with. Maybe you can start your
introduction with the Che quote and
“deconstruct” love to mean, in this context, understanding and
connection. Then, in the main body of your paper, don’t refer back to
love but instead to understanding/connection. If you want, you can come
back to the idea of love in your conclusion.
- Beauty
-- Maybe then you can talk about how you pursued/discovered/practiced
this passion (or found the most meaningful feeling of connection and
understanding? That might actually work better) in the form of beauty.
This could be pretty general; you just want to introduce the idea.
- A
thesis-y bit might be helpful in here somewhere. Something along the
lines of “connection and understanding are important to me, beauty is (the hobby?) where I found the most meaningful feeling of connection and understanding, and
I want to bring my desire for this connection and what I’ve learned about
that connection from beauty to my career.” I know theses are so middle
school, but they really help to clarify your ideas!
- Beauty
-- your most meaningful feeling of connection
- Perhaps
here give a more detailed description of why beauty is meaningful to you
at the beginning of this middle part of your paper. One way to organize
this section would be to divide your passion for beauty into two main
ideas:
i.
You
could talk about the connection, understanding, and exhilaration you experience
when you experience beauty in one way or another.
ii.
You could also talk about how it’s equally
important for you to share this feeling you experience with other people, and
how you do that by creating beauty yourself.
And this could all be pretty
general, just a sentence or two. Again, just briefly introduce the ideas and
then elaborate on them in the three different categories. "Beauty is
important to me because of the feeling of connection I experience, but also
because of my desire to share this feeling of connection with others."
- Then,
you could discuss poetry, fashion, and (I’m just going to call it graphic
design now) under this section, using the experience/sharing idea you
brought up earlier to help structure your paragraphs and emphasizing your
participation/creation of beauty a little more than you have now.
- Career
- It's
a little bit trickier connecting your passion for connection in the form
of beauty with your interest in a career in politics, but I definitely
think you can do it!
- Perhaps
start this section by talking about what you’ve gained from your
participation in these three activities, and emphasize the connection
with people and creativity.
- Then,
talk about how you can bring both of these things to a career in
politics, which is all about connecting with people in creative ways.
- Conclusion
- You
can even bring the idea of love back into your conclusion if you want.
Because you have this connection and creativity from doing the things you
love, you should be able to be an effective politician. And, since
politics should, in theory, be all about helping people, you can bring
these skills to your job, where you try to improve things for the benefit
of humanity. Then, ta-da, it's ultimately all
about your love for humanity (or would that be way too much of a
stretch?).
So, there is one organizational strategy that made sense
to me, given what you presented in your paper. Sorry if I’ve imposed too many
of my own thoughts about structure onto your ideas, it just seemed like
organization might be the most helpful thing to talk about at this point.
Oh wow. I almost forgot the sentence revision.
Original: I am also passionate about beauty in its many
forms. Whether it is beauty as expressed in fashion, photography, or in music,
it is yet another way to create a connection with our fellow humans.
Revised: I am passionate about beauty in its many forms:
whether expressed in fashion, photography, or in music, it is yet another way
to connect with my fellow human beings.
Très bien!
Megan
6.
Chetna --
You presented an admirable set of ideas and goals, and I
enjoyed reading your paper. The main thing I would suggest working on at this
point is organization. It helps me to give suggestions about organization if I
sketch out my understanding of the outline, but keep in mind that this is just how
I understood it:
- What
is passion
- I’m
passionate about life
- At
this stage, I’m passionate about helping others
- Volunteering
as a mentor – helping women overcome unrealistic ideals of beauty
- Volunteering
at SMS – inspired (is that the right word for this?) you to pursue
international medicine
- Poornima – help to increase literacy in
India
- Struggle
with your passion, but will always live passionately on your journey to
discover your true calling.
To me, it felt like you were trying to develop two main
ideas. The first is that of living passionately, which you focus on in the
second paragraph and come back to strongly in your conclusion. The second idea
is that of helping people, which you focus the body of your paper on. I think
you either need to choose one of these to develop, or find a way of connecting
them more closely, because they seem somewhat unrelated at this point. The
paragraphs of your paper themselves seemed very separate and unconnected at
times as well, which made them seem somewhat unrelated.
Given what you have right now, here is one way I can see
to organize your paper:
1. Though the introduction was
wonderfully vivid, it seemed unrelated to your general set of ideas. Either get
rid of the first paragraph or incorporate it, only in a sentence or two, into
your paragraph about living passionately.
2. Use the paragraph about living
passionately as an introduction, and find some way of connecting living
passionately with helping people. Perhaps something along the lines of "I
strive to live my life to the fullest, but I also feel a strong need to help
others get the most out of life" (without making it sound like you want
everyone to live like you [my sentence sounds a little like that, but I just
wanted to get the connection across]).
3. Then, have something thesis-y
somewhere in this paragraph to introduce the three instances of helping people
that you're going to discuss in your paper.
4. Talk about all three instances,
taking care to link them to each other and to your general idea of helping
people/living passionately
5. Perhaps you can use your
conclusion to project your passion into the future, kind of like what you have
now. Something like "to live my own life as fully
as I can, I feel that I must help others" etc etc,
and then you can talk about possible career choices or whatever.
I think all of the ideas are there, but they just need to
be connected! If you worked on the structure that you present in the beginning
of your paper and the transitions between your ideas, I think you’ll be in good
shape!
Here are a few other, less important things that I
noticed:
-- "I don’t want my picture on the poster," she
whispered meekly, "I’m ugly" [sic].
I’m pretty sure you don’t need the [sic] here.
--
"I refuse to allow such rampant manipulation to continue to poison society
and young girls’ mind any longer. I have a passion to
do anything in my power to better mankind, and here is my opportunity that I
choose to seize."
I think
you could strengthen your ideas quite a bit if you elaborated on what actions
you’ve taken toward this, or, if those actions are acting as a role model to Jacquiesce, to at least make it more clear to your reader. When I read it through, it seemed as if you vehemently insisted
that you won’t put up with this distortion of beauty any longer, but then
dropped the topic without explaining what specific actions your were planning
to take. You mention acting as a role model at the beginning of the paragraph,
but the paragraph didn't really elaborate on that idea.
-- (literally)
I don't think you need it the first time and the second
time I think you can do without the parentheses
-- The paragraph about Poornima has a slightly condescending tone, and I think it might help the reader
sympathize with your ideas if you shifted the tone a little bit
-- I think there needs to be a paragraph break after
"...a familiar of illiteracy in
India
."
--Italics
are useful, but it’s good to be careful about overusing them
Original
sentence: More specifically, the ability to make another human feel better, to
uplift the spirits of someone, to lift the weight that quells a spirit, or to
just bring a smile to someone else’s face, is what drives me.
Revised
sentence: I am driven by the opportunity to make others feel better, to uplift
their spirits, and to bring smiles to their faces. (You could also replace the
plural "others" with "someone," but then you run into the
problem of having to use his or her. But it could work that way too).
Overall, nicely done.
Megan
7.
Mauro --
I can
honestly say I smiled the entire time I read your paper! I really enjoyed
reading it, because a lot of the things you pointed out seemed really accurate
(especially about adults and kids feeling the same way, but adults being able
to hide it better -- I’d never really thought about it like that before).
-- The
Declaration of
Independence
introduction seemed a little bit forced. Is there
another way you could introduce the topic? Though it’s good that you introduced
the two things you’re going to focus on in your paper, I think it might be
helpful to start a little bit more generally. Of course, you then run the risk
of being <i>too</i>
general, but I think you can find a good balance if you talk about how you’ve
come to discover that making other people be happy is something you really
enjoy doing, and that these two events were milestones/turning points on the
path to your discovery? (Though something a little less trite
than that, haha). I think the next place to do
something topic-sentence-esque is the paragraph
starting "It was long before I had..." I think you might also have to
emphasize your discover in that paragraph a little bit more. You know, now that
I look at it again, you could use the paragraph about your ENFJ personality
type as an introduction with a little bit of massaging. And actually, I think
the recovering-old-friends paragraph would flow nicely into the "my desire
to help people has not been satiated" paragraph. What do you think?
-- The
paragraph about helping people anonymously and the "not much time as a
college student" paragraphs seem a little unconnected. Can you put in a
transition that links them more closely?
-- I
think it would help your reader follow your organization of you started the PALs paragraph and the old-friends/new-friends paragraph
with introductory sentences, giving a very general explanation of what you
learned/gained from the experience. Something like "I really learned about
the value of friendship when I started mentoring with PALs."
-- I had
some trouble understanding the second part of your paper. I can kind of see
what you’re saying, but at the same time it was difficult for me to follow your
ideas. This second idea flowed directly from your PALs section, and it’s good that they’re connected, but if you could distinguish the
second part from the first a little, that might help.
Those
are the main things I saw, but I’d be happy to do persnickety
grammar/diction-type edits if you want.
Original
sentence: Since then, I began to see people in a different light, smiling at
people I did not know, greeting people I had hardly met; everyone was my friend,
whether or not they knew who I was – everyone had a chance.
Revised
sentence: Since then, I’ve seen people in a different light and I’ve made an
effort to smile at people I don’t know and greet people I’ve hardly met. From
this point on, (is the beginning of this sentence redundant?) I’ve viewed
everyone as my friend, whether they knew me or not, and given everyone a
chance.
Hoorah
for happy people!
Megan
