Paper 1 Revision

A challenging aspect of analytical writing has always been organization. In this paper, I found it hard to separate each idea into clear-cut categorized paragraphs. I found that I repeated alike ideas in different paragraphs that could have been more logistically grouped together. For instance I moved the following sentence to the first paragraph: “rather than easing into the topic and explaining who the author is Cooke portrays Jimmy in such a way that the audience is swayed to sympathize with him. Described with a “cherubic expression on his small round face”(Cooke), Jimmy is portrayed as an innocent child with a far from childish addiction.” I reworked the idea to fit seamlessly into the end of the first paragraph so it reads as: “By sharing with the audience such detailed observations, it encourages the reader to imagine the scene from Jimmy’s point of view–a small child dwarfed in a large, comfortable chair, like any living room anywhere. However, as innocent as Jimmy appears with that ‘cherubic expression on his small round face’(Cooke), his addiction is far from childish.”

Something else that needed revision is the addition of context. Rather than introducing Cook and her background I jumped right into the analysis. In this kind of writing you cannot assume that the audience is knowledgeable on the topic. What I changed is I added basic facts that are critical to the clarity of my argument in the first paragraph. I mentioned how she worked for the Washington Post and how she received a Pulitzer Prize for this article. I want to add in other sources that comment on the event to add more depth to my argument. Also, in this paper, I did not delve deep enough into the specification of ‘audience.’ Though I mentioned it I never defined who exactly that audience would be. Adding more details about audience, who would read this, what class of people, what age etc. would make my thesis and argument more clear and directed.