Blanca Vargas Martinez

College Writing R1A, Section 002

October 5, 2017

Real Paper 2

Dear Blanca,

It becomes apparent that throughout your essay you attempted to convey your reader that

your argument is precise. You managed to construct a great summary of the documentary but

you failed to provide your audience with more in-depth analysis. Your claims regarding this

subject were present and it is noticeable that you made an effort to support them with evidence.

On the other hand, your evidence lacked justification as to why exactly you are claiming

Rushkoffs concerns are the ones you seem you mention and why you agree with them. Due to

the lack of explanation and shallow in-depth analysis, your argument concerning what

Rushkoffs concerns are became less reasonable. As a result, I would grade your paper as a

Pass/No pass due to the reasons described below. This grade is not to discourage you but instead

to motivate you more in the near future. I believe that you have potential to construct a better

well written essay and of course we have to take into consideration the time constraint that you

were under.

As you began your introduction you directly started providing a summary of the

documentary, which is good but in this case, I would have liked to see something else before you

introduced the documentary. Perhaps, you should have begun with a rhetorical question or an

anecdote that potentially arouse the interest of the reader and then go ahead and introduce what

the documentary is about. However, as you developed your summary I was confused by a
minimal detail where you mentioned that Rushkoff examined different ways companies use

social media to promote their products. My question is what are the ways? It would be best if

you tried to incorporate the ways that companies use social media to benefit themselves so that

the reader can comprehend what you are trying to communicate. All in all, your introduction had

a clear and to the point summary which was very helpful for an outside reader to know what was

going on in the documentary.

Furthermore, as I got to your thesis I noticed that it could have been polished it more in

order to state your argument more clearly. You seem to have an argument in your thesis, but I do

not think it is clear enough. You definitely mentioned that Rushkoff is concerned about the

extremes teens are willing to do to be part of a companys strategy and if teens have an idea of

what they are doing. On the other hand, I was confused as to what you were inferring because

from what I can grasp teens are in favor of this strategy. For instance, in the part of your

argument where you mentioned what teens are willing to do you are referring to likes right? If

that was your point then you should have incorporated likes and not strategies in this part.

Moreover, in the sentence following your thesis, I was not so sure what the purpose of it was.

How is it that the way that companies respond to this situation more meaningful to Rushkoff?

Overall, your introduction requires more work in order to construct a solid thesis. Your thesis

failed to mention why your argument matters. Make sure to work on these few details and I hope

to see a more well developed thesis.

As I analyzed your first body paragraph, I noticed that you went directly to your sub-

claim as to why teens decide to sponsor companies. So far you have made a good point here and

supported it by introducing Steven Fernandez who saw this situation as an opportunity to provide

help to his family since he came from a low-income background. As the paragraph proceeds, it is
evident that you are trying to communicate that teens are willing to do whatever it takes to seek

the attention of more people, but I believe you should have introduced the reason behind they

like to do so earlier on in the paragraph. For instance, you should have included that right after

you mentioned, he began experimenting with more videos that could capture more peoples

attentions. If you were to mention that he wanted more likes after this your sentence and

organizational structure would have flowed in a better way in your paper. At the end of your first

body paragraph you did not express your own analysis/opinion on your claim. Instead you

mentioned more of what Rushcoff thinks and says throughout the documentary, which is great to

some extent. Simply make sure you as a writer have a voice too here. Another problem I

encountered at the end of your body paragraph is that you incorporated a quote directly from the

documentary. I was not sure how you managed to include a quote from the documentary, but if

you do choose to include a quote from the documentary take into consideration that later on in

your next paragraphs I will expect more quotes. Will you be able to provide more quotes for the

rest of your paragraphs? I personally, really liked how you managed to involve the reader as you

incorporated a rhetorical question towards the end of this paragraph. In other words, this

encourages the reader to think critically as they proceed to read your paper. In your very last

sentence, you once again confused me when you mentioned that in the case of Steven all he

cared about were likes, but you suddenly switched to say that he is not aware of what he was

doing. Therefore, my question for you is what is he doing that does not make it certain of it?

Perhaps, go more in depth in that sentence and explain more what you mean by that. All in all,

this first body paragraph had its highlights, but lacked a lot of your opinion and better

explanation of the evidence you provided.

 In your last two body paragraphs, I noticed that your claim was not clear enough for your

reader. You began your second body paragraph with a sentence that somewhat confused me. You

stated that companies accept that their consumers are their marketer, but you failed to further

explain what companies in specific. Ultimately, what you mentioned here is very broad and

vague. Also, you keep on mentioning this strategy, and the strategy which makes it

somewhat repetitive and not concise at all. What I also noticed throughout this paragraph is that

you failed to demonstrate why one of Rushkoffs concerns in this documentary is the way that

companies respond to the situation. You did include you evidence by mentioning how Ceilis

obsession with Hunger Games has led her to her constantly be retweeting about the Hunger

Games and promote the movie series. In addition, you also failed to once again give yourself a

voice in this paragraph. It is very important for you to stress what you think of this situation and

the way you interpret it. Moving on to you third body paragraph, this whole paragraph was

dedicated to your personal experience which in a way is great but I think there is few information

that you should have just been left out. Nonetheless, I admire the way you connected to the

situation and mentioned an instance where you as well were part of the strategy companies use to

promote their products. I do think that this paragraph is very informational since you have

experienced this first hand, but in some part of the paragraph you went off to mentioned too

much detail. In other words, you went off explaining the process of how you were contacted by a

watch company and you debated to either sponsor them in your photography account or not. As

you proceeded, you kept on giving more and more details, but less analysis in the situation. I do

have to say that this was a big I say and I really liked it, but once again I would have liked to

see more analyzation from your part here. Therefore, your last two body paragraphs were not so

bad but both did fail to provide more profound analysis to convince your claim. Your conclusion
at the end of your essay seemed somewhat shallow in the sense that you basically repeated

yourself with almost the same exact wording you had in your thesis statement. This could have

been due to the pressure of time however, you could have ended your conclusion with a much

stronger statement.

Now, taking into consideration the grammar and word choice in your paper, you could

have perhaps revised your paper for a few minutes before turning it in. Of course, I understand

that given the situation in which you wrote your paper it is impossible to go error free throughout

your essay. There were several instanced where I noticed that you could have expressed yourself

in a better way simply by replacing a few words. For example, on your second body paragraph

you mentioned extremes and in my opinion, you could have replaced that word with a less

loaded word such as extents. There were a few sentences that needed some grammar and

structure correction which I believe that if you were to fix them the flow of you essay would

have been better. Other than that, going back to word choice, you could have incorporated more

sophisticated sounding like words so that your essay could have sounded more refined.

Just as I had mentioned before, because of the grade I gave you I do not want you to feel

discouraged, instead try harder next time and you will notice better results. My job here is to

sculpt you into a better writer and believe me in order to become a better writer you have to put a

lot of effort and dedication. For the next time that we do a timed writing, I would recommend

you to do a quick outline defining the key concepts that you would like to mention in your essay.

Something essential that I would like to point out is to incorporate your I say more throughout

your essay and make it evident that you have an opinion here. All in all, I believe that you have

the potential to compose a better essay next time if you, of course, put the effort and dedication
needed. If throughout my evaluation you had any questions do not hesitate to come see me

during my office hours so we can discuss this more in depth.