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What are the weaknesses in the essay about Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat"?
Quick answer:
The essay on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" has several weaknesses. The thesis is awkwardly phrased and grammatically incorrect. The essay is also structurally flawed, with sections instead of coherent paragraphs. There are numerous grammatical errors, including run-on sentences, incorrect semicolon usage, and subject-verb agreement issues. To improve, the essay needs a clearer thesis, better organization, and elimination of grammatical mistakes.
Based on this prompt, it looks like you have been asked to find "an" essay online which a student has written about Poe's "The Black Cat" and then do some work in editing and revision, thus hopefully improving your knowledge of the story and sharpening your editing and revision skills.
The link I'm providing is an essay which a student wrote and submitted online. The first thing I always tell students to consider is the thesis. If the thesis is awkward or confusing, the entire paper can head off track. Here is the thesis of this paper:
This paper endeavors to show how the writer has used various images and plot development to create a horrifying and dreadful atmosphere that drawing the reader into the narrators demented and haunted mind.
The core idea is there, but the phrasing is long with lots of clauses. There are also some...
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grammatical errors (narrator's should be possessive and drawing is the wrong tense). I also tell students to avoid referring to "the paper" itself and to instead just say what needs to be said. Here's a revision of that thesis:
Poe uses first person point of view, vivid imagery, and unexpected plot developments to create a horrifying mood.
This thesis also more closely aligns to the majority of the content that follows, so I would recommend restructuring the information into paragraphs that follow these three main ideas. Create one paragraph to explain how the point of view increases the horrific mood, another explaining how the imagery is horrifying, and a third that tackles unexpected plot developments.
This revision would certainly make the ideas in the paper more organized and understandable. And then I'd tackle some of the grammatical issues, such as:
- Numerous run-on sentences—See the last sentence in paragraph 2 for an example.
- Lots of sentences that are far too long and awkwardly constructed—See the sentence that begins with "Later" in the introduction.
- Incorrect use of the semicolon, which should be used to combine two complete sentences. This has been incorrectly done in both the introduction and in the second paragraph.
The paper has some good ideas, but a thorough revision that better organized the ideas and eliminated the many run-on sentences could produce a paper that is more academically sound.
References
The first reference listed below is a link to an English class blog that features a student-composed essay about Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Black Cat." In the essay, you will immediately notice some errors that need to be corrected.
First, short story titles must have double quotation marks around them. Each of the three words in this story's title must be capitalized. In this essay, the student calls the story a "book," a mistake that weakens the author's credibility from the start. The essay also contains some run-on sentences and sentence fragments. You should revise those. For example, the third sentence is a run-on.
The fragment that begins with "A cat who" has been punctuated as a sentence. You'll need to join that to the previous sentence with a comma. In addition, change the who to which; use who for people and which for things and animals.
You should proceed through the essay, correcting errors in usage and punctuation as you go. Some of the sentences are rather garbled; for example, the third sentence of the second-to-last paragraph (beginning with "It has been established") is rather indecipherable. You'll need to make a guess at what the author means and rewrite the sentence accordingly.
If your assignment requires you to correct problems with the content of the essay and not just grammar and usage, this essay deserves a significant rewrite. The author has made a critical mistake in attributing moral "sins" to Poe because Poe has written a story about violence and murder. Many authors write about such dark subjects because these types of stories interest readers and make money. It doesn't mean the authors themselves are evil.
This student-written essay does not display excellent critical thinking or writing. It will give you plenty of mistakes to correct.