Three Academic Goals I Want to Achieve This Year

Crystal's feedback:

"You do a good job staying focused on your goals with a clearly defined essay structure made up of the intro, body paragraphs, and conclusion. However, some of those elements could be stronger and better focused. In the intro, for example, you focus on other students and change the point of view (POV) a few times ("students," which is third person; "you," which is second person; and "I," which is first person) and don't clearly outline your three goals in a detailed thesis statement. Using the first-person POV throughout the paragraph (and your paper as a whole) would be ideal (except where you need to detail info about someone else; e.g., your friends/teacher, as it relates to you), and creating a thesis statement at the end of the intro that outlines your three goals would show the reader exactly what you're going to talk about. You do a good job keeping each body paragraph focused on one goal, but using a clear topic sentence that states the goal for each paragraph and uses transitions would strengthen both the paragraphs and the flow. For example, you could even use "First," "Second," and "Third" to structure the body paragraphs and establish transitions. On the content in each body paragraph, you might consider using similar details for each (e.g., state your goal, state why it's important to you, and state how you will go about achieving it); the current details are a little unclear in some spots because they’re not as focused on you as they could be--you’re the star of the essay, so you want to show the reader what matters to you and why. In addition, there's some sentence structure issues throughout with run-on sentences (e.g., 2nd sentence of your 1st paragraph) and sentence fragments (2nd sentence in 4th paragraph), as well as other punctuation and grammar errors (e.g., last sentence of first paragraph has a misplaced modifier because "I" should come immediately after "After studying hard" to show after who has studied hard). Finally, the quotes attributed to your teacher in the third paragraph are confusing without quotation marks around them. If you keep those in place, make sure to use quotation marks so that it's clear they are your teacher’s exact words. Overall, you do a good job of identifying three goals that are important to you, but if you can add in more specifics and address the issues detailed above, your essay would better show the reader what goals you want to achieve for the year and why they matter to you."

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