Dr. Morillo Eng251Q 3/3/2016
Comments for AlR1.doc (Love, possibly the most inconsistent and unexplainable force in the
universe…)
Very impressive. You’ve spoken well in class and your writing here is consistent with your best
remarks. You have a rich vocabulary and I feel a real engagement with complexity in your
discussions of poetic meaning.
Excellent interpretive skills, and imaginative arguing. Grammatically, almost flawless. One
questionable word choice. Since you clearly can write, we'll work on honing your writing
optimal arguments about literature. Your witty "humorously" in the title is indeed central to that
penultimate, ingenious turn to humoral theory. You might strain your reader's credulity and
patience in casting either poet as actually a case of humours, but it does show your knowledge of
the medical psychology appropriate to their times. Where it works much better is in the Marvell.
The anger or spite in Wroth is maybe a shade less than choleric, but calling Marvell melancholy
in this poem shows imagination and precision. You convince me that it's the ideal term for the
mood of its implied author, thanks to your sharp breadth of the idea, including deliberative,
contemplative, and able to find some comfort in despair. That's a fine gloss (and see Keats' "Ode
to Melancholy" for a further view of it).
Equally fine is your gloss of the planisphere's borders as the very parallel lines of a few lines
later. I had not seen it that way until your persuasive diagram. Your grasp of each poem is equally
strong.
So here's what could be improved. You clearly state a thesis in the intro, and the counter claim
about gender is very effective already. However, the leading claim tells us there is a difference,
but not what it is. By giving a fuller claim in the thesis you then raise more concrete
expectations, and can use the paper to more quickly get to a direct defense of the full claim. Your
best thesis instead falls in the midst of p. 3. Note how it mirrors the 2-part form of the intro, but
this time gives a more precise claim: both define the lack of perfection in love. That's a great
point and would be even better back in the introduction--but it also flips the coin. You've gone
from essential difference to great similarity. The ideal revised intro would negotiate between
these ideas, creating one nuanced, new thesis.
Finally, despite these ways to revise the intro, your conclusion is very good, avoiding needless
recap and ending with a fine point.
Grade = A
Dr. Morillo Eng251Q 3/3/2016
Comments for DW1.doc (Many writers, when asked about love, describe it as a feeling, an
emotion…)
Very good essay. Good clarity and often excellent argument. You do have some grammatical
errors on p. 3 but nowhere are they debilitating. You argue well and directly, accurately appealing
to the texts for your best evidence, as in that fine point about the meaning of the a/b rhyme in
Marvell. I also like the strong attempt to make the introduction and thesis not just a list, but a
claim for a single, unifying key term: vain. The direct answer to the gender question is also
effective.
You interpret very well here, showing ability to handle both poems. Your noting the way Wroth
treats love as a person, while Marvell treats it as his possession, is sharp and illuminating. You
show depth in the way you can develop a paragraph from seeing a moment of transition in the
middle of a poem.
Here's where I see room to improve your already strong arguing. Using your pars. 2-3 as a model,
note how well they put their main point or claim first. In the long par. on 2, even though the idea
of transition is great, see how it slips into the middle of the paragraph. You instead began with a
less precise version of the idea in "sees the way the poem is written." Aside from feeling logically
circular, this needs the clarity and accuracy we then see so well in the transition-in-the-middle
idea.
Even though p. 1 par. 2 places a strong point first (love as possession) note that the rest of that
par. doesn't really address the idea of possession. The paragraph therefore lacks focus. The best
edit would be to start this par. with "The rhyme scheme" and put the idea about possession into its
own, new paragraph.
Grade = A-
Dr. Morillo Eng251Q 3/3/2016
Comments for AM1.doc (The varying ways of depicting love have long been the topic…)
Good writing and arguing, good facility with verbs, and excellent point about the way Wroth's
poem and tone makes plausible evidence for her defiance of gender conventions. Your strong
suits also include a unified thesis that directly answers the questions and supplies a nice key term:
tone. You show good command over complex data when you can discuss the direct contrast of
the two poems within single paragraphs, and your care with each poem is evident.
Since you show no grammar problems, we can focus on your argument. The argument about W
starts of very well and has both clarity and depth. Where it loses a step is in the hiccups on logic
on p. 2. Your "even though" doesn't set a good contrast, because you say even though both are
cynical, she is cynical. It seems you mean for the tone idea to be key, so that a cynical poem
might not have a cynical tone, but is that really possible? This section has trouble being precise
about the critical proposed difference between cynical and resentful. That's an idea with good
depth, but you don't yet explain well just how to differentiate the two ideas.
While the argument about Marvell is clear and vigorous, I find it has less depth, because its
emphasis on anger and resentment, though accurate toward fate, neglects the way the conjunction
of minds is not described angrily, and implies a poem more balanced between despair and hope.
Similarly in your next section, the gender argument for Wroth is very good, but the one for
Marvell rests on much less provable assertion about universal male attitudes.
Although I dispute these parts of the argument, for me to do that I acknowledge that you've
indeed made an argument and gone well beyond merely summarizing. That's already quite good,
as are your grammar and mechanics throughout. They show fine potential. At the end, having
given such nice reasons for the differences, it’s both disingenuous and ineffective to revert to
"whatever reasons."
Grade = B+
Dr. Morillo Eng251Q 3/3/2016
Comments for AA1.doc (At the beginning of time men mostly dominated the field of writing…)
Your paper uses good grammar, but in a very weak argument. You're able to make claims-Marvell's poem seems to convey the message that nothing is greater than love--but those claims
are never supported with the kind of evidence needed for making an argument about literature.
Hence it is not very effective as an interpretation of either poem. I can tell you really care about
issues of equality between the sexes generally, but I see too little direct evidence that you have
any accurate or precise understanding of either poem. Far too often you rely on sweeping
generalizations about the sexes. But let's grant that they are true. The paper still spends far too
little time on the way anything in the poems connects directly with those claims about the sexes'
attitudes to love, and in some cases, the poem directly contradicts your claim. Your idea about
women being the jilted ones sounds plausible, but is inaccurate with respect to Wroth: she uses a
male speaker for that poem.
Maybe you felt some of that evidence was obvious and needn't be stated? Since all literature must
be interpreted, your explanation of your own understanding of specific words and parts of the
poems is crucial. Further troubling here, none of the categories of representation from class and
the assignment is mentioned here: subject, tone, style etc. You summarize the plot of Wroth ok,
but don't even do that with Marvell. We see an argument only in draft stage, because your
introduction is only able to offer a tentative and non-specific answer to either question, and most
of the introduction is not about the poems at all.
Using the critical thinking terms proves helpful in showing how much you'll need to improve.
Clarity of writing-as-sentences is pretty good; accuracy is fair, precision is poor, as is depth.
When you strive for breadth, as in the remarks on Steele, you sacrifice relevance. Logic is weak
on p. 3. Most important, however, is a term not on that sheet: focus. Your focus needs to be on
the poems rather than on your sense of how people are. In just the way that the poems are almost
an afterthought in your introduction, they remain too distant from the paper. Note that in some
paragraphs neither Wroth nor Marvell nor any words from their poems are mentioned.
I know this is disappointing, but I've already seen signs that you can do much better. Your answer
to why Shakespeare's sonnet 118 was more sincere was v. good and did just exactly what you
needed to do much more of in this essay: it showed real attention to the details of the whole
poem.
Grade = C-
Dr. Morillo Eng251Q 3/3/2016
Comments for AR1.doc (the one I described as the tougher paper to grade: “One of the most
beautiful things about literature is that authors rarely share…)
You show a good, detailed understanding of each poem in isolation but don't provide nearly as
good an argument to compare them.
The main thing that kept the essay from being better was your choice of how to order the paper,
primarily as full summary of one poem first, then the other. Although you offer complete and
accurate summaries of each poem, in the Marvell section especially we drift further and further
from answering the questions directly: ideas that compare directly the most significant differences
between the poems. Your careful summaries are exactly what you needed to do first, to be able to
answer the questions, but they are a preliminary step toward the different structure and order
you'd need to choose to present those answers as an argument. They fit better with the notetaking and pre-writing stage than the final writing.
The difficulty for your reader when you opt for sequential summaries is real. You leave it largely
up to us to make the direct comparison between the features of the poems, and to decide which
specific ones matter most and why they do. You've got all the raw material here for a better
argument, but you make your reader do that work you needed to do. Exactly the kind of direct
discussion of both poets that you do well in your last par. on p.4 is what we needed throughout
the paper.
Your introduction gives a strong hint why the paper diverges from its needed goal. The thesis
idea about gender is direct and crisp, and the latter discussion of it in the paper is as well. There's
a tighter match between this preview of the idea and how it reappears. But for the "literary
techniques" you suggest that meter, rhyme, genre and tone will matter most. Tone works well for
the sarcastic, disdainful traits in Wroth you spot well. But you have very little to say about genre,
meter, or rhyme. Instead your better ideas are not in the intro: personification, metaphor.
When I lay out the Points in each paragraph, they offer accurate readings of parts of the poems,
but they do not explain whether those parts constitute a significant difference. Summary got you
breadth, but only at the cost of relevance to the questions. Note also that when the Point is marked
at the ends of pars. that's a sure sign that you are still working through just what you think. A
strong argument begins each paragraph with the point, and selects only those aspects of the
summarized material that best explain and defend that point. Your first body par. is the best as
argument, because it is point-first and it leads with a conclusion about the whole poem, rather
than walking us through it in pieces.
You clearly understand each poem well but had a very hard time getting to the direct comparison.
I think you COULD explain where W and M conflict most and why it matters, but your
summaries took away the time & space you needed to devote to that explanation.
Grade = B-
Dr. Morillo Eng251Q 3/3/2016
Comments for JH1.doc (Love is one subject that has been looked upon with different views…)
When you introduce the essay by saying only that they are similar and different, you make us
choose which one they are or how to reconcile these two different choices. Instead you need to
have some words telling why or how they differ. Your answer to the 2nd part is better for being
direct, but it too needs a "because" explanation. Tell us why how it has that effect.
I understand that you felt you needed to tell a story to make sense of the poems. The problem
with that is that you tend to get further and further from any of the kinds of evidence within the
poem the more your story gets elaborate. If we ask to apply Relevance here, it gets harder to see
how any given words and phrases in the poems would need such stories as yours to make sense. I
see your own imagination at work , and I do like the way you try to ground it in key words, as
with wantonness. However, to write about a wanton character need not require being wanton, and
even though an affair leading to a baby might be a good case of wanton behavior, where in the
poem do we need to think of a baby born to a jilted woman to make sense of it? Yes a "babe" is
there, but as a metaphor of love being selfish, demanding, fickle. Crossed by love yes, but just
how so becomes a matter of pure speculation and very hard to argue.
The Marvell section starts stronger because you say clearly that he's different via point of view.
The rest of that paragraph is mixed. It shows a good understanding of the poem, but much less of
an appropriate expansion of the particular claim about the poem's point of view. It's necessary to
be able to tell the story of the poem to yourself, but the point you make doesn't require that full
story. And all of your rich details find to little of even the literal meaning of the poem.
Imagination when reading poetry is always necessary. However, it must stay grounded in at least
the literal meanings of the words on the page. Here we don't see lust, marriage. We do see Fate
jealous of a love, and a weird yet compelling picture of an ill-fated love as two points on opposite
sides of a sphere.
Do those really require your tales of jilting and heartache?
Grade = C