Essay #2 Response

I commented upon Ramin’s essay, “The Dark Side of Salvation.” I really enjoyed reading this essay as a whole. The introduction way very well laid out; it gave background into Sullivan’s piece and then introduced his thesis. Although the thesis was a little vague, it gave him lots of room to expand upon it in the body of his paper, which I always see as a good strategy.

The main thing I had trouble with throughout the paper was that while you used great examples which were all well developed and supported with textual evidence, I was unsure where you drew the lines between pathos, ethos, and logos. You mention the idea behind them briefly in your introduction, but you don’t even use the words “ethos,” “pathos,” or “logos” anywhere in your essay. It was a well-written essay that maintained numerous strong points about Sullivan’s argument, but I felt as though it did not successfully meet the requirements of the paper. This is something I constantly struggle with as well: I will write a great essay or response, but later realize it doesn’t exactly answer the questions my professor was asking. I always have trouble deleting it and re-writing something different, but unfortunately that’s what we have to do. I would recommend reshaping your essay slightly and maybe reorganizing some paragraphs to more aptly distinguish between the separate facets of your argument.

In addition, there were quite a few grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors, but nothing that can’t be fixed with a bit of careful rereading. When writing a paper quickly, it’s easy to overlook the smaller things, so I would recommend reading your paper out loud to yourself (as silly as that sounds) and making sure your sentence structure and everything else sounds the way you pictured it would in your head.

Overall, I think that you’re headed in a great direction with your paper and did a wonderful job pulling the best evidence out of Sullivan’s argument to use in your paper. I’m sure after a few revisions, your paper will be wonderful!