Essay Critique Needed..perhaps Something To Do When Your Bored

[Luv4TheDuece 0]

The following is an essay I turned into my Eng 111 Class. Im looking for some honest criticism whether it be constructive or positve. The essay prompt went something like-"Compare two short stories and tie their themes together in order to illustrate a cohesive point. You must add 4 literay comments from aclaimed critics as well as tie in a piece of art on display at the Santa Barbara Museuem of Art."-Something like that excpet it was more in detail. The essay I turned in was enititled "Learn How to 'Work' Kid". The two stories I tied together were John Updike's "A&P" and Robert Carver's "Cathedral". "A&P" is about a 20 year old kid quitting his job because his boss hates the attitudes of his youthful generation. "Cathedral" deals with a 40 year old man having to put up with a blind house-guest for the night. I thank you for your time and seriousness.Noah TuckerEng 11111/27/07‘Learn How To “Work” Kid’There is a unsaid requisite for social activity, a requirement for today’s individual in our fast-paced society, that they have the ability to bamboozle their fellow peer into thinking that they are actually interesting and important to us. Whether it be acting as if you were interested in what your neighbor did for Thanksgiving or pretending as if you are genuinely fascinated in your peer’s “burgeoning” acting career, everyone must have the ability to appease another individuals ego should the eventual need arise. The brown-noser has become a staple for effective propulsion up the ranks of the incessant corporate ladder of today. This thin veil of social bullshit hinders our progress towards true self-satisfaction. So what happens when people refuse to conform to the social standards of politeness in lieu of an honest exchange of their true thoughts, moral values, and opinions of one another? An epiphany of sorts, one in which you realize your self-dissatisfaction outweighs the social-dissatisfaction you have with your peers due to your recent gravitas. Relinquishing the chains of social servitude opens your eyes up to what really matters to you in life, and this can give you a brand new understanding of what is really important in your own unique world. John Updike’s “A&P” and Robert Carver’s “Cathedral” both focus on what happens when people forsake their masks of artificiality in exchange for an unwarranted glimpse into a real reality, an practice that is solely unique to the individual and his experience.Tucker-2 The man in Updike’s “A&P” is a socially contorted soul who realizes his conformity is the reason of his destabilized psyche. It is only after he hears his boss cut a promo on three girls that he realizes his mask of social servitude has kept him from being the kind of person he values, someone that is against demeaning lectures and Mickey Mouse mandates that should have no government over any aspect of his life. After all, we begin to see what happens to the brain-washed victims of society when we look at Stokesie who is the pinnacle of 1960’s unabated conformity. Stokesie is attacked by the critic Robert Peltier for his “impending doom” when he acknowledges that “(Stokesie) is twenty-two, an age at which it is legal…to marry and to have children. He is vested in the system. It is only the young who have not been indoctrinated, who still have the freedom — and perhaps the courage — to make choices”(Peltier). His refusal to think and garner decisions for himself has left him at a one-way crossroad of life, one where he does not have a choice of individual freedom.Upon realizing that his façade has turned him into something he never wanted any part of, the protagonist makes a decree worthy of any hippie’s approval when he tells the manager that his actions were highly offensive and inappropriate to himself not as a worker, but as an individual. He might have been in the same boat had he approached the argument from the standpoint of a employee and understood his boss’s appeal. But the conviction of his persona warranted a different response, one that was more humanistic and compassionate, one that was more honest towards his core values. However due to his disposition as an employee, the only way to punish his boss in response to his power-trip was, unfortunately for both parties, to quit. His refusal to conform in exchange for Tucker-3upholding his ideals led him down a slippery slope, one where he chose his individuality over the corporate costume of capitalism.The host in Carver’s “Cathedral” is the perfect prototype of an individual who feels he must appease the social criteria that comes along with entertaining a blind man. He talks about benign subject matter, feigns interest into what the man has to say, uses alcohol as a lubricant to ease the awkwardness that first time meetings can sometimes have. Rather than embracing the individuality of both himself and his guest, he relies on boring formal conversation to appease the social requirements of a meaningful introduction. The typical protocol for the stereotypical man looking to avoid any substantial interaction or meaningful connection. In many ways you could argue that the narrator was the one who was truly the blind man in this particular circumstance. The execution of his plot is flawed however, for the host does not expect to discover the blind mans is able to see in “different” ways, to be able to shed the metaphorical cocoon that protects him from social disappointment. This difference in attitude is important for understanding the furtherance of their relationship and we can better understand it when looking at Diane Andrews Henningfeld contrast between the sweet blind man and the ignorant narrator when she states that “Although he is blind, he “sees” how to get along with others in profound and important ways. By contrast, the narrator, although sighted, does not see how his isolation damages himself, his wife, and their relationship. He is metaphorically blind to his own human relationships” (Henningfeld). His constant mask of appeasement has bled into his personal life and created a rift between him and his wife, one that he was not even aware of due to his Tucker-4knack for social complacency. Kirk Nesset addresses the narrators coming out of his skin when he says “In “Cathedral”…we witness the rare moments of their comings out, a process of opening up in closed-down lives that comes across in both the subjects and events of the stories and in the process of their telling, where self-disenfranchisement is reflected even on the level of discourse, rhetorically or structurally, or both”(Nesset). By opening up to his host, by acknowledging his shortcomings, and by including the man in his activity of mental cataloging, the blind man is able to break past the barrier of a safe peer to peer interaction into the matter-of-fact realm of friendly foundations. It only when the protagonist puts down his mandated blockade that he begins to take the experience for something more than what it is on the surface and truly “see the light“ of a genuine social interaction again. When bringing these stories together we begin to see that both men realize that their masks of accommodation have kept them from truly understanding who they are and what they value as individual people in a society that emphasizes they not think for themselves. Many times, as in Gunther Gerzso’s painting “Le Temps mange la vie”, we may give off the impression that we are wooden in substance even though we are secretly made of oil(Gerzso). This disguise helps us cultivate relationships with people we might normally not get along with and facilitates a healthy social lifestyle that is rich with diverse interactions and colorful opinions. However, we must remember to emphasize what is important to ourselves when it comes to foreign ideas and malignant stereotypes. By making common assumptions about life and mindlessly following the Main Street of superficiality (i.e. blind people are dull and fruitless and working mindlessly under a Tucker-5fascist boss is a requirement for a meaningful existence) the protagonist’s in the stories were unable to create an authentic definition of their individuality in society which carried over into their personal lives at home. “Learn how to work kid” is an expression used by some of my friends that means know what people want and expect from you. Give them that peace of mind for the collective benefit of the relationship you share with them and everything will be better at the end of the day. But sometimes through all of that hoopla we can be side-tracked into the same synthetic mentality of placation, even with the ones we know and love the most. Being able to “understand thyself” is a concept most people will struggle with throughout their lives. Even many responsible and admirable adults are unable to come up with a clear cut answer when they ask themselves “Am I happy at the end of the day? Am I being true to my core values?”. Because of the many faces we can put on, it can be easy to stumble down the path of confusion and unreliability on one’s own stance. The idea that we might be able to fully comprehend the minute decisions we make in life is one that we must completely disregard if we should hope to have any semblance of closure at the end of the day. It is only when we can be fully honest with ourselves, both consciously and unconsciously, that we may begin to feel comfortable in our skin.Tucker-6Works Cited- Carver, Robert. “Cathedral.“ Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 5th Compact ed. New York: Longman, 2007. 99-109-Gerzso, Gunther. Le Temps mange la vie. 1961. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA. 11/2007-Henningfeld, Diane. “Short Stories for Students.” Rev. of Cathedral, by Robert Carver. The Gale Group 1999. <http://www.answers.com/topic/cathedral-story-9>-Nesset, Kirk. East Tennessee State University.edu. 08 April 2002. Whittier College. 04 Dec. 2007 <http://www.etsu.edu/writing/studentsamlit/carver.htm>-Peltier, Robert. “Short Stories for Students.” Rev. of A & P, by John Updike. Gale 1998.<http://www.answers.com/topic/a-p-story-9>- Updike, John. “A&P.“ Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 5th Compact ed. New York: Longman, 2007. 15-20

[chrozzo 19]

might help

[Luv4TheDuece 0]

I need critique, not that. But thanks.

[Don Giovanni 0]

um dont use words like "brown-noser" and "bullshit"i only read the first few lines so ill assume there are other mistakes like that.

[Dirtydutch 8]

um dont use words like "brown-noser" and "bullshit"i only read the first few lines so ill assume there are other mistakes like that.

Granted my last writing class was pretty advanced (not to mention my well-known track-record of taste and tact), but I used way worse in every paper. Way, WAY worse. Like, if I didn't simultaneously threaten you and make it clear that I've never actually seen the inside of a vagina, there was serious consideration given to the possibility that I didn't really write it.Anyway, I never really had a problem, w/r/t that. Maybe your professor is just a cunt.

[LongLiveYorke 38]

There is a unsaid requisite for social activity, a requirement for today’s individual in our fast-paced society, thatthey have the ability to bamboozle their fellow peer into thinking that they are actually interesting and important to us.

I may be wrong, but shouldn't it be "he," "his," and "he," respectively? I think indivudual is singular.Your essay is fine. Sometimes, it comes across as a bit forced. It seems at times that you try to insert big words or fancy constructions for their own sake rather than for the sake of serving your ideas. While this often works on high school teachers, professors tend to see through it. An essay is more about original ideas. You will benefit yourself by thinking really hard about the characters in question. You are finding similarities between their themes, but try also to contrast them. Show the different ways that they shed the burden of society's social requirements and their differing results. What really turns on a college professor is a complex argument. They want to see that you understand the issue from all levels and are able to point out the nuances and details associated with the work.When in doubt, try to critically analyze a small passage that epitomizes your point. See if you can extract the author's opinion about society through this passage and demonstrate how he conveys his opinion.I don't know, these are all ideas. I haven't actually read any of these so I can't provide any real help.

[LongLiveYorke 38]

Granted my last writing class was pretty advanced (not to mention my well-known track-record of taste and tact), but I used way worse in every paper.

Oh yeah, the best part of college was the ability to freely swear in my final exams. After being so stressed out one year, I took my anger out on Aeneas. Boy, he felt my wrath in that essay. To be fair, he was a bit of a pussy to begin with.

[Dirtydutch 8]

Oh yeah, the best part of college was the ability to freely swear in my final exams. After being so stressed out one year, I took my anger out on Aeneas. Boy, he felt my wrath in that essay. To be fair, he was a bit of a pussy to begin with.

Oh, God, he's the reason for the school-yard taunt, "do you want your mommy to help you?" It's also nice to be able to summarize complex and important figures as nothing more than "a fag-bag," few maybe a few adjectives tacked on.

[jeff_536 3]

There is an unsaid unspoken prerequisite for social activity, a requirement for today’s individual in our fast-paced society, that they have the ability to bamboozle their fellow peers ((fellow peers is redundant)) into thinking that they are actually interesting and important to us. Whether it be acting as if you were are interested in what your neighbor did for Thanksgiving or pretending as if you are genuinely fascinated in your peer’s “burgeoning” ((why is this in quotes?)) acting career, everyone must have the ability to appease another individual's ego should the eventual need arise. The brown-noser has become a staple for effective propulsion up the ranks of the incessant corporate ladder of today. This thin veil of social bullshit hinders our progress towards true self-satisfaction. So what happens when people refuse to conform to the social standards of politeness in lieu of an honest exchange of their true thoughts, moral values, and opinions of one another? An epiphany of sorts, one in which you realize your self-dissatisfaction outweighs the social-dissatisfaction you have with your peers due to your recent gravitas. Relinquishing the chains of social servitude opens your eyes up to what really matters to you in life, and this can give you a brand new understanding of what is really important in your own unique world. John Updike’s “A&P” and Robert Carver’s “Cathedral” both focus on what happens when people forsake their masks of artificiality in exchange for an unwarranted glimpse into a real reality, an practice that is solely unique ((redundancy again)) to the individual and his experience.Gramatically, that's what I saw in a quick read through of the first paragraph. You are in desperate need of either a higher level of literacy or a professional proof-reader.

[Southern Buddhist 1]

This will be a super-long post... My boss is a Shakespeare professor, film professor, English professor, theatre visionary who built the world's only re-creation of Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse, and general all-around genius. He wrote these rules for his English class one year and our theatre put them on the website. Ysterday a board member asked me to e-mail them. Turned out we neglected to post them on the newest version of the site. I Googled the title and found that hundreds of other professors had taken them from our site and started handing them out to students. It's good advice, and a clever essay.By the way, you break rule 31 a lot and both LLY and Jeff make several good points.Professor Ralph A. Cohen’s 39 Picky Rules of WritingThese rules may be “picky,” but they are also the required rules of college level writing. Adhere to them. I will. I expect you to demonstrate your fluency in the following and to consult your Writers INC and other sources if you don’t understand even one of these do’s and don’ts. 1. Care about your ideas and the paper you have written. Imagine it in a book entitled The Works of [...your name...]. 2. Whether you type, word process, or handwrite (if your writing is legible), (1) use one side, (2) double-space, (3) use white, 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper, and (4) leave reasonable margins (no more than an inch). 3. Number your pages at the top right-hand corner. 4. Give your paper a title that is informative, not cute. The name of the work you are dealing with is NOT the title of your paper. "Shakespeare's Use of Time in Hamlet" is by a thoughtful person; "It Takes a Broken Egghead to Make a Hamlet" is by a jerk; Hamlet is by Shakespeare. 5. Underline or italicize all full-length films, plays, and books. Underline magazines and newspapers. "Short stories," "film shorts," "one-act plays," and "articles" go in quotation marks (" "). Do NOT underline or put your part of your own title in quotes. 6. Establish the context of your paper in the first sentence: "John Wayne first appears in Stagecoach with a rifle in his hand." NOT: "Duke has a gun." 7. GIVE YOUR PAPER A CLEAR THESIS SENTENCE AT THE END OF YOUR FIRST PARAGRAPH. This rule is the one most important way to please a reader. 8. Do not use one or two sentences as a paragraph. 9. Each paragraph must stick to the subject introduced by the first sentence in that paragraph. 10. Do not misspell words. Misspelled words look dumb; do not look dumb. Use a dictionary or a literate friend to check your spelling. Be warned: spell-check will not catch all the mistakes. 11. A possessive without an apostrophe is a misspelled word. 12. One exception to rule 11: "Its" is the possessive of "it". "It's" is the contraction for "it is." Since I do not allow contractions, you will never need to write "it's" on a paper. 13. Make the transition between your sentences and your paragraphs clear and logical. This task is the most difficult in writing, but, as you know, life is a vale of tears. 14. Do not use the first or second person -- I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours; you, your, yours -- unless I say you may. 15. Do not use the passive voice ("Careless students are failed by Mr. Cohen"); use the active voice ("Mr. Cohen fails careless students"). This rule is the most important rule of style, and it has serious consequences for your thinking and meaning as well. If you want to be a good writer, the first thing you must do is to understand what the passive is and avoid it like herpes. 16. Do not begin sentences in any of the following ways: "There are/is..." "This is..." "It is..." 17. Do not use "this," "these," "that," "those," "which," or "it" unless the word has a clear and unmistakable antecedent nearby. Never begin a sentence with "this" unless you follow it immediately with a noun that re-identifies the idea to which you are referring. 18. Never publicly dangle a participle or misplace a modifier: WRITE: "Showing unmistakable signs of stupidity, the student did not persuade his professor;" NOT: "The student did not persuade his professor, showing unmistakable signs of stupidity." 19. NEVER write an incomplete sentence (participles -- "ing" words -- cannot stand alone as verbs). 20. Do not hedge. Words like "maybe," "perhaps," and "might" do not keep you from being wrong; they merely alert the reader to the fact that you are worried about it. 21. NEVER JUST SUMMARIZE OR PARAPHRASE. Remember that I have read it or seen it. I do not want to know what happened. I want to know your ideas about what happened. 22. Support your assertions and ideas with concrete examples or brief quotes from the story, poem, play, or film you are discussing or with a short citation from some reliable authority. 23. NEVER use someone else's ideas (even in paraphrase) or words without giving proper credit. a) When the quote is from the Bible, put the book, chapter, and verse in parenthesis immediately after the quotation [e.g. (Psalms. 12. 6.)]. b ) When the quote is from Shakespeare, put the play (unless you've mentioned it), the act, scene, and line number in parenthesis right after the quotation [e.g: (King Lear. 3.1. 25)]. c) When the quote or paraphrase is from someone else, put his or her last name and the page number of the quote in parentheses following the quotation [e.g: (Cole 27)] and list the book in good bibliographical form in a works cited list at the back of your paper. 24. On those extremely rare occasions when you quote more than two lines of text, indent the quotation and leave off the quotation marks. In American, the final quotation mark always goes after the comma and the period and before the semi-colon and the colon [e.g: ," / ." / "; / ":]. 25. Do not split infinitives (keep the "to" next to the verb): WRITE: "I wanted quickly to drop the course" or "I wanted to drop the course quickly." NOT: "I wanted to quickly drop the course." 26. Know these three rules about commas: a) Join independent clauses (clauses with a subject and a verb) either by using (1) a comma with a conjunction ("Readers have extraordinary sex lives, but non-readers tend toward impotence and frigidity.") or (2) a semicolon without a conjunction ("Readers have extraordinary sex lives; non-readers tend toward impotence and frigidity.") b ) Separate items in a series by using a comma after every item before the conjunction ("The arbitrary, arrogant, and nasty professor refused to accept journalism rules of punctuation."). c) Never use a comma between the subject and the verb or between the verb and its object (except for interrupting clauses which use 2 commas). 27. Bury words like "however," "furthermore," "moreover," "indeed," (conjunctive adverbs) in the clause or sentence. "The students, however, failed." NOT: "However, the students failed." 28. Write about works of art in the present tense, since Hamlet will be stabbing Polonius and Charlie Chaplin will be eating his shoe long after your grandchildren have forgotten your name. 29. Be consistent when you have two or more parallel structures in a sentence. With adjectives: "He was pompous and terrorized freshmen" is wrong. "He was pompous and fond of terrorizing freshmen" is right. With prepositions: "A student could count on his bad temper and arbitrariness" is wrong. "A student could count on his bad temper and on his arbitrariness" is right. With correlatives: "He graded not only for content but for style" is wrong. "He graded not only for content but also for style" is right. 30. Avoid jargon (say "library"; do not say "instructional media center"), cliché (say "the professor is a conservative grouch"; do not say "the professor is an old fogey"), slang (say "the teacher is foolish"; do not say "the teacher is a dork"), and hyperbole (say "this man has too high a regard for himself"; do not say "this man is the most arrogant bastard who ever lived"). 31. Use your smallest, most Anglo-Saxon, most comfortable words; big words impress only insecure administrators and William F. Buckley. 32. Lose the words "very" and "effective" from your written vocabulary. 33. Avoid rhetorical questions. 34. Conclude your paper with a paragraph that explains the importance of your ideas to some larger understanding. Do not allow me to ask "so what?" 35. ALWAYS WRITE A SCRATCH COPY. Even Shakespeare revised. Unless I say differently, turn all scratch copies in with your final version. If you use a word processor, you must save and print the first full-length version of your paper and hand it in with your final copy. 36. Before writing your final copy, have an intelligent friend read your paper to you and then fix the things you don't like. 37. Staple your paper at the top left-hand corner. An unstapled paper incurs a 25¢ (15p) stapling fee. 38. Regardless of who loses your paper - you, I, or the dog who ate it - you're the one who will have to rewrite it or get an F. So be safe: keep a duplicate of your final version, either in hardcopy or on a backup disk. 39. Never write more than the assignment specifies. Remember what Shakespeare could say in a sonnet (14 lines).

[Cappy37 0]

might help

Just a word of warning considering these sites. There are complete scams out there among them.My senior year for one of my final essays I "ordered" one such essay (for some easy additional sources to cite).The essay they sent me (despite my bolded request) had no works cited, bibliography, footnotes or anything resembling any attempt at citing/revealing any sources). And the entire essay they sent me was lifted word for word from the first hit back one would get by typing the two key words in my working title into Google.So yeah, 40 bucks down the drain, and they never responded to any of my calm-yet-stern emails.So yeah, be warned, most of these sites aren't good for doing anything beyond grade-school level written work. Even in middle school you need sources cited.

[phlegm 6]

Genius,absolute genius.

[Buckeye Hughes 0]

There are 2 more smart people on this forum than I thought there were

[DrawingDeadInDM 0]

Wordiness. "There is a unsaid requisite for social activity, a requirement for today’s individual in our fast-paced society, thatthey have the ability to bamboozle their fellow peer into thinking that they are actually interesting and important to us."Easily becomes(and much more clearly, IMHO)...There is an unspoken* prerequisiste for social activy that one must be able to bamboozle their peers into believing they are interesting and important.

[Luv4TheDuece 0]

Thank you all for your time and critique. Ill try to dumb it down a little from now on.

[Galactic Ray Jetworn 0]

18. Never publicly dangle a participle or misplace a modifier: WRITE: "Showing unmistakable signs of stupidity, the student did not persuade his professor;" NOT: "The student did not persuade his professor, showing unmistakable signs of stupidity."

Sometimes it can't be helped.

[checkymcfold 0]

Thank you all for your time and critique. Ill try to dumb it down a little from now on.

i don't think that you need to "dumb it down" at all. most of the edits i'd make to your writing could be fixed by reading your paper out loud--colloquialisms and wordy sentences become very, very clear when you do that, usually.briefly, also try to reword sentences to avoid using the word "the" so much.

[nutzbuster 7]

Essay looks ok but no one is gonna give a flying fuk once you become a manager at Wal Mart.

[DrawingDeadInDM 0]

Thank you all for your time and critique. Ill try to dumb it down a little from now on.

Heh.

i don't think that you need to "dumb it down" at all. most of the edits i'd make to your writing could be fixed by reading your paper out loud--colloquialisms and wordy sentences become very, very clear when you do that, usually.briefly, also try to reword sentences to avoid using the word "the" so much.

Yep..exactly.

[Vandees 0]

Your essay doesn't seem too bad, I'm just going to reiterate what most people have already said: You're trying way too hard with the use of your complicated wording.I'm in law school, so I've read my fair share of difficult text. The easier to understand, the better. Read it aloud. Your losing some of your emphasis because of the words you are using and the phrasing. Its not "dumbing it down", its making it clear. There's a huge difference. Good luck, hope you do well.

[David_Nicoson 1]

25. Do not split infinitives (keep the "to" next to the verb): WRITE: "I wanted quickly to drop the course" or "I wanted to drop the course quickly." NOT: "I wanted to quickly drop the course."

I think we're pretty much over that. The whole argument against it revolves around how infinitives work in other languages. Well, English has this neat-o feature that allows us to put the adverb right where it goes to express something unambiguous. There's no reason to ignore it.