English Composition

English Composition Study Guide

Weak Response Analysis: The essay is written using informal language, rather than the academic vocabulary seen in the two other responses. The use of words like “hubby” and “spoiler alert” are too informal for an exam writing. The writing has a conversational tone, instead of the professional tone it needs. Within the writing, the author waivers on the stance, and uses words that weaken the writing like “probably”. The author does not seem to have a strong grasp on the story, and makes use of summary more than analysis. While the writing does provide textual support, the explanation that follows does not appropriately respond to the prompt. The themes of marriage and freedom are not mentioned, and the writer gets off topic by the concluding paragraph, giving more of a critique on the story and characters, rather than a look and how literary devices played a role in developing theme. Argumentation Essay Prompt: Using “Monuments to White Supremacy”, from a New York Times editorial by Brent Staples, construct an argumentative essay. Respond to the issue of confederate monuments being removed from public areas. Provided Reading: Monuments to White Supremacy by Brent Staples The legendary Memphis newspaper editor Ida B. Wells was targeted for assassination — and driven into exile — for exposing the lies that were routinely used to justify hanging, dismembering and burning alive African-Americans in the Jim Crow South. Whites were particularly outraged when Wells said in an incendiary editorial, “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women” — implying that rape accusations that preceded lynchings arose from the discovery of consensual sex between black men and white women. By the time Wells took refuge in the North in 1892, white Southerners had made racial terrorism a fact of life and embarked on a propaganda campaign that romanticized slavery, idealized the Confederate past and held that white supremacy would restore lost Southern greatness. The Confederate monuments that sprang up in public spaces across the South— and that still stand today —were an essential part of that campaign. The Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were popular choices for veneration. But Wells’s beloved city of Memphis set its sights on Tennessee’s native son, the Civil War general and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. A monument of Forrest astride his horse towered over a public park in the city for more than a century until shortly before Christmas, when the city overcame state opposition to finally dismantle it. During the Civil War, Forrest presided over the slaughter of surrendering Union troops — many of them black — at Fort Pillow in Tennessee. He later served as the Ku Klux Klan’s first grand wizard,

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