How Langston Hughes' Life Influenced His Narrative Poetry in Mule Bone

Lela's feedback:

"Reading through this essay, I can see that you have studied both the life of Langston Hughes and read his work enough to see and reflect on the parallels. The content of your paper is expansive enough to include multiple aspects of his life, like his jobs as well as his community and racial experience, but remains focused on how his life and writing affected on another and his community. There's also a variety of sources for quotations including primary and secondary sources which give credit to what you are saying.

The difficulty with this paper is that many sentences are awkwardly worded either leaving out a word or adding in a word or two that confuse the meaning of the sentence some. I think most, if not all, of these issues could be resolved by reading the paper aloud to someone or even to yourself. The other thing to watch for is your quotation marks. It is distracting as well as confusing when a quotation starts but never ends, and there's a quote that ends with a star that doesn't seem to signify anything in this paper. Also, the end-punctuation for many sources comes after the source but for even more comes before the source. No matter what style guide you use, consistency is necessary within the same paper. Spend a bit of time reviewing what quotations should look like to establish some consistency and readability.

Lastly, a few tweaks could make this paper 5/5 on Organization. Mainly I would say to take a look at your thesis, which could be clearer. The idea for your paper is a good one, but the wording of your thesis is overly simplistic. Your conclusion is also weaker than the bulk of your content because of how general it becomes. As a small example, "tremendous" as a description for Hughes could be changed to match the rest of your points by maybe saying "influential." By the end of your paper you can be more specific because your audience has read your paper now and is familiar with your argument. You make some good claims in the body of your paper. Make sure the strongest claims you make are in the thesis and also come back around in the conclusion at least as strongly."

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