How Language Has Shaped How I View the World

Bridget's feedback:

"As your reader, I can tell you've really thought about the question from different angles, exploring them in this current draft. As you move into the next draft, I recommend a focus on organization and structure to make sure your reader understands how the concepts relate. For example, your first body paragraph moves from tones to math smoothly thanks to signposting and transitional words, but the jump into listening and hearing isn't as clear coming off of math. I encourage you to use a reverse outline to get a bird's eye view of the essay; using this, you can start thinking about where a new paragraph might help structure the discussion better, if ideas can be grouped differently, and other tweaks that help your reader out, like further signposting language.

Another area of focus will be in the specific ideas and the logic of their presentation. For example, you make a good point about tones in Mandarin but this is not exactly the same as changing pitch in English--you are getting at an interesting point about meaning, but don't overstate the case.

In paragraph 3, make sure to clarify that you are moving into a discussion about written language; otherwise, the reader is confused as to why you need to assert that people used language BCE.

Zooming in, I notice grammar issues, some awkward phrasing, and typos (or misspellings, e.g., "it would be interrupted [interpreted?] differently"). You are off to a good start with your citations, using signal phrases and making sure your reader can see where you are getting your information. Check your parenthetical placement against your style guide resource: your page number should come at the end, and I recommend moving the author's name out of the parentheses and into the signal phrase, or drop the signal phrase and place the citation after the sourced material: Boroditsky explains how we learn to count using language (4). or We learn to count using language (Boroditsky 4)."

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