Catherine Owens

1. Thesis:

What you argue is reasonable, but various grammatical and stylistic errors corrected throughout your essay in red ink and elaborated upon in my comments below distract and detract from the argument’s effectiveness in terms of how it is presented.

2. Analysis:

You need to mention more specific examples of Progressive accomplishments, such as specific laws that were passed and when or specific examples of muck-raking authors and their works.

3. Development of Argument:

I like that you have a title, but be creative and have a more original title to grab your reader’s attention. It may seem minor, but these little things sometimes help make essays stand out as going that extra mile when compared with others in the class.

Have a more dramatic lead. Open with an attention-grabbing quotation or short anecdote to start things off creatively. After all, an essay is a still a work of literature and can have creative flourishes to make each one stand out from the others in the class. For example:

Historian John D. Buenker (born 1937) asks, “What was Progressivism?”

Whenever you mention our country’s name for the first time, write the full name with the abbreviated form used later in parentheses. So, first time: The United States of America (U.S.A.). Subsequent times: U.S.A. Besides, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_(disambiguation) for the numerous historical countries with “United States” in their names.

Whenever you introduce an event for the first time, indicate when it occurred in parentheses: The Progressive Era (1890s-1920s).

Whenever you mention someone who is not a monarch for the first time, write his or her full name and indicate when he or she lived in parentheses: Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924).

Please see http://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/ending-essay-conclusions for how to conclude an essay. Note, for example, the sentence about how you should avoid such phrases as “in conclusion,” “to conclude,” “in summary,” and “to sum up.” These phrases can be useful--even welcome--in oral presentations, but readers can see, by the tell-tale compression of the pages, when an essay is about to end.

4. Structure:

Please be sure to have typed page numbers in the upper right hand corner of each page as I have on this comment sheet.

Please be sure to have one inch margins on all sides of your essay as I have on this comment sheet.

Please format footnotes as I do on the syllabus for the grammar tips. Indent the first line of each note by five spaces. Use 10-point font for notes.

Please only cite your sources using footnotes following the Chicago Manual of Style. Do not also use parenthetical citations.

5. Grammar and Prose:

Be consistent with capitalization. For example, sometimes you have “Progressivism” and other times “progressivism”. You do similarly with “Blacks” and “blacks”. Pick one way and stick with it!

Proofread more carefully!

Use “impact” for something physical such as a car crash and not when you more precisely mean “affect,” “effect,” or “influence”.

Please be sure to follow all six grammar tips from the syllabus. This: Diana Hacker explains that “The pronouns this, that, and which should not refer vaguely to earlier word groups or ideas. These pronouns should refer to specific antecedents. When a pronoun’s reference is too vague, either replace the pronoun with a noun or supply an antecedent to which the pronoun clearly refers.” William Strunk adds, “The pronoun this, referring to the complete sense of a preceding sentence or clause, cannot always carry the load and so may produce a vague statement.” Edward G. Berenson goes further with regards to the “naked” this:

For most Russians this period was not a happy time.

Naked “this”: For most Russians this was not a happy time.

As a general rule, novice writers should avoid using the naked this (or the naked that, these, and those), because these terms may easily lead to confusion on the part of the reader:

The result was a harsh economic recession that caused widespread unemployment, misery, and hunger. Rather than alleviate this, the government made things worse.

What did the government fail to alleviate? The recession? The suffering caused by the recession? Both?

Revision:

The result was a harsh economic recession that caused widespread unemployment, misery, and hunger. Rather than alleviate this suffering, the government made things worse.

Now it is clear that the writer is referring to “widespread unemployment, misery, and hunger.” Thus, one out of only six grammar tips or 17% were inadequately followed in your essay.

6. Sources:

Because this assignment is in part a midterm exam, I also need to see what you learned from lecture. As such, you should footnote a relevant lecture as a source for your essay at least once in your essay.

Because I have had the class read and comment on so many articles from History and Headlines, be sure to cite at least one of those articles in a footnote in your essay so as to make use of multiple course materials. The article at http://www.historyandheadlines.com/history-july-19-1848-the-first-womens-rights-convention/ would be relevant to your essay. The article at http://www.historyandheadlines.com/10-major-steps-forward-towards-womens-rights/ would also be relevant to your essay.

Per the Grading Criteria Chart on the syllabus, be sure to include a visual source inserted directly into your essay:

Figure 1. Chart of The Progressive Era Amendments taken from http://images.slideplayer.com/20/6217509/slides/slide_18.jpg (accessed 29 March 2016).

After all, an article in a journal, magazine, or newspaper typically includes visual sources to illustrate what is covered in the text. Also, see http://i.stack.imgur.com/mtj0p.png and http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/27253/Imagecitation-Chicago.PNG and notice how the image has a label below it.

7. Averaged Grade:

If you made no changes your essay would be in C-range in terms of its grade. If you follow my suggestions above, you should improve your grade on this assignment. How much the grade improves depends on how effectively you make these changes.

� John D. Buenker, “What Was Progressivism?” in Retrieving the American Past (Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2006), 1-45.

� Diana Hacker, A Pocket Manual of Style, Fourth Edition (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004), 39.

� William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition (New York: Allyn & Bacon, 2000), 61.

� Edward G. Berenson with Katie Beals and Catherine Johnson, Europe in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 56.