The first peer response that I read got straight to the
point, The writer decides to write about jay Gatsby and his tragic life, and
stays on topic through the entire essay. However, unlike most people, this
writer decides to write about how Jay seems to be pathetic, and how that leads
to his tragedy. Even though this is a wonderfully well written essay, it does
have some flaws that I would like to comment on. Near the middle of the essay,
the writer kinda starts to sum up the book, rather than state what each thing
that they are summing up means. Like when they say: “Tom loses his faith in daisy
and runs away from east egg with her” There are many other parts that are just
summed up, and I think that might be the main reason for a possible loss of
points. However, The test results weren’t posted, so I don’t know what this
particular person got on their essay, or some of the critiques that the judges
had for them.
Before I continue onto the next response, I would just like
to stress how important neat handwriting is. Reading an essay that is written
in sloppy cursive isn’t reading. It’s torture. Don’t be that guy.
The second response that I read was a little late on the
draw. The main point wasn’t mentioned until the very end of the first paragraph,
and that just left me really confused. The writer also decided that is was a
good Idea to repeat the first sentence twice, just with different words, to take
up more lines. I would strongly advise against this, seeing how the judges do
in fact understand English. I would also like to point out that summing up
things in a story is not exactly the same as writing about them, I would hope
that we would know this by now, because we are in AP lit, but I guess some
people never got the memo. Consider this your intervention. I also noticed that
the essay used the same quote twice when trying to make one point, this makes
it sound redundant, probably because it is. I didn’t really notice anything
special about the essay, it was hard keeping my focus on it, mainly because of
the handwriting, but overall I think that this essay should score about a 3.
The main point of this essay was hard to follow, and there were a lot of parts
that were just summed up.
I would just like to thank the person who wrote this, I
really enjoy actually being able to read what you wrote. I know that this is
the third essay, and we all know that this writer didn’t score so high, but Its
nice being able to understand what they write. That being said, lets point out
flaws! Firstly, the paragraphs are way too short, I can’t understand what you’re
getting at in a paragraph with only two sentences. I seems like you didn’t plan
well, and you are arguing things that you really can’t back up. After the first
few paragraphs, the entire book is summed up, and none of it is actually analyzed.
I think that this essay wouldn’t score more than a 2 because of the lack of
preparation, the writers inability to stay on topic, and the summary of the
entire book without building on it what so ever.
Rachel,
ReplyDeleteGirl, you need to reread your work. There were some errors, but they were so minor SO don't freak. Thankfully, you were speaking in English so I could follow you. I do believe I read this same prompt. And, yes, neat hand writing is a must. But stress does things to people Rachel...From reading this post I can tell that you were able to grasp the flaws in each essay. For the first essay though, what do you think this student did well on? Quoting? Accurate details to add support? Huh? I mean again, no biggy, but by noticing these details we can beat ourselves with the information so that we too will know how to right a stellar essay response in May. Oye. Violence is not the answer, sorry.Last thing, provide examples for example prompt 3. I'm not sure I did this, but your readers most likely want to agree with you about student #3's response. Poor kid.
I agree with Ludia, it will be helpful to reread posts. But I know that I am making myself a hypocrite by saying this because when I don't triple-check I leave the silliest mistakes present in my post. There's a couple of grammatical errors, and Jay's name should be capitalized in the first paragraph. But these are simple errors that can quite simply fixed. Trust me, there's worse out there so don't worry too much. The main thing I had a hard time with was the structure of this post. Try using a different paragraph to explain what you liked and/or dislike about each student writing sample and whether or not you agree or disagree with the AP judges on their scoring. I know I usually disagree, but I am always curious to see what others think. And using more quotes will help. And YES, I agree with both you and Ludia on the third writing sample. MOST DEFINITELY A "POOR KID."
ReplyDeleteRachel,
ReplyDeleteFor student LLLL’s essay, I kind of agree with you. It feels like there is too much of a summary present due to the convolution of evidence that the writer uses without a full explanation of how they support the claim. Student C’s essay I found quite repetitive as well. In addition to what you pointed out with the thesis and re-used quote, this student loves to use the word “idiotic.” With student FF, yes they summed up a lot of the book, but I wish you would mention its lack of evidence.
One thing that I should say though is that you can’t let yourself get so caught up in hard-to-read handwriting. It feels like your post is missing out on a lot of quality simply because you are distracted by how difficult the essay is to read. Focus more on the pieces and pick out more than just “oh, it seemed more like a summary.”
P.S. ~ If you would like to see the scores these essays received and the reasons why, then there actually are the AP reader’s comments in the open prompt folder. They are located in the scoring commentary PDF file that precedes each year’s questions.