Feedback:
Dear Student A,
Your second paragraph is pure gold. I love how you set yourself up in contrast to those writers who love their craft and appear to be effortless in their production. At the end of that paragraph you give a succinct definition of “apprehenzled” and the emotional state that it entails. With how great your second paragraph is, it makes me wonder whether your first paragraph is really that necessary as you essentially repeat and expand upon everything contained within it in your second paragraph. Along with that the language is slightly confusing in the first paragraph as I get that you are trying to place yourself in that second category of people who feel “constricted, overwhelmed, and aggravated when writing” but in the next sentence you then say you fall in the (3rd?) category of those who feel “intimidated and puzzled when it comes to writing.” While these two adjectives are synonyms of “constricted, overwhelmed, and aggravated” they do not mean the same thing and you want to avoid confusing your reader right off the bat when you claim there are only two categories of writers.
Part of your struggle with writing I think relates to this idea you harbor that you must write “something that has not been said before.” A famous line states, “There is nothing new under the sun” and if you internalize this notion perhaps you can lessen some of the pressure you put upon yourself. Anything you write, because it is written in your voice, will have a degree of uniqueness to it due to the fact that no one thinks or writes like you do. Will your writing become literary canon and be worshipped for ages to come? Probably not, but that is true of 99.99999999% of writers so I recommend not losing sleep over it.
A note on plagiarism: Be careful of not reusing content from earlier papers you have written in ones you are writing currently. The last three sentences of the third paragraph are almost word-for-word from the Mike Rose assignment you did a couple weeks ago. Reusing ideas is okay, but you must change the wording significantly for it not be considered plagiarism.
Your second-to-last paragraph needs unpacking and it would be nice to see you relate what you are talking about back to being “apprehenzled.” There is a lot of interesting content in this paragraph; it just needs to be explained in a little greater detail.
Generally speaking, I highly recommend you read your drafts aloud to yourself before turning them in. Doing so will reveal many, if not all, of the typos and sentence structure issues throughout your paper. If you want to take it a step further you can read the paper backwards (last sentence first, second-to-last second and so on).
Overall, you have a solid paper here; you just could use one strong revision to take it from good to great.
-Kamryn
Behind the Scenes:
I made a point of leading with what I saw to be the most positive aspect of the paper and then diving into the constructive criticism section of the feedback. I think I illuminated the areas that would need addressing to take this paper to the place it could be. The only difficult part while I was writing the feedback section came when I unexpectedly felt my icy heart melting and what was once harsh criticism ringing through my head as I read the paper softened into simple constructive criticism. Part of this stems from a want to not pit myself against the student, but this softening always seems to happen without me even being conscious of it. Students need to be able to hear my feedback and if it has the wrong tone or language I will fail in my attempt and my effort to help them will fall mostly, if not entirely, flat, wasting my time and theirs…