Argumentative Essay

Response to #1
When I received the final grade for the argumentative essay, the grade assigned was a little lower than what was expected. I thought that I had satisfied the requirements and had a well written paper. I would not consider my essay to be the cream of the crop, but I worked extremely hard on trying to perfect this essay. I felt like I spent a long time writing the essay and I had many revisions to my rough draft. The option that I choose to write about was the topic of arguing of why Savage Inequalities should stay in the Humanities Base Text.
I thought I had several strengths in my essay. The first strength was a great thesis in which opened up the essay to what I was going to write about in the essay. This allows the reader to have a grasp of what the direction the essay will be following and also what the author will be explain or arguing. I was glad to see that there was a comment on my paper that stated that I had a good thesis.
Another strength in my essay was that I brought up good points of argument in the essay. These points will influence the English department to keep the text in the Humanities Base Textbook. These arguments in the essay are the bulk of the essay in terms of how well I argued the point of keeping Savage Inequalities in the text.
The next strength included a great source that stated that Savage Inequalities was one of the most influential texts written for education because it provokes action and discussion. The article talked about how this text influenced people to go and help out the places mentioned in Savage Inequalities. I consider these points that I have mentioned to be the strengths of my argumentative essay.
There were several weaknesses in my essay. In several cases the transitions were not complete between paragraphs. This causes the reader to not understand where the end of the paragraph is and where the beginning of the next paragraph is.
Another weakness in my essay was not addressing the audience in the first paragraph. By not addressing the University of Dayton English Department, the reader has no clue of what the argument is about or who it is directed to. This was a mistake that I made in the introduction of the essay. These were some of the weaknesses in my essay.
Overall, I understood all of the comments on the essay. All of the comments were clear by that they directed me to errors that needed to be corrected in the essay. I felt that these were clearly marked. One question that I had was about the organization points of the paper. This was the only part of the essay that wasn’t clearly marked. I wasn’t sure of why I lost some points in this area. Overall, there was a lot of good points that made my essay very strong and there were also some areas that were weak.