Why People Should Support Arranged Marriages

Crystal's feedback:

"You've done a good job with making sure to use a good essay structure, with a clear intro, three identified components of your argument, topic sentences, and a conclusion. In addition, you've correctly included a counterargument and rebuttal. However, there were some areas you could strengthen the main components. First, your thesis statement should ideally come at the end of the first paragraph, and there’s no need to explicitly state “I support…” because you make that clear through the three components of your argument. Second, the points of your argument are not as well supported as they could be, especially in terms of analyzing the information, and some paragraphs could be more tightly focused (e.g., your third body paragraph has a lot of details, but they aren’t clearly connected to each other). In the first paragraph, the context explaining who the quote is from is also unclear, and there’s no MLA citation for the quote. It would also be great if you engaged more with the quote/support for each element in your argument by flushing out the underlying logic, with stronger support, and showing explicitly how each connects back to the topic sentence and your overall thesis statement (essentially the analysis that proves your point). That means bringing each paragraph back around to the “so what?” element--why the information in the paragraph supports the paragraph’s topic sentence *and* your thesis statement. Third, with the counterargument and rebuttal, flushing out the rebuttal a bit more would strengthen that paragraph, as would including a “so what?” element to connect back to your thesis statement. In addition, with the MLA citations, page numbers should be included, if available, and the long quote in your third paragraph should be a block quotation, per MLA, given its length. Consider either cutting down the length of the quote or paraphrasing it instead to avoid the need for a block quote. Finally, while you do a good job with transitioning overall, there are quite a few POV changes (maintaining third-person is ideal, especially to avoid “you”), and punctuation and grammar errors, especially run-on sentences (e.g., the last sentence of your 2nd paragraph is a run-on). You have a great overall structure to work with, but if you can strengthen the logic/analysis in each of the argument points and the counterargument/rebuttal, clean up the grammar/punctuation, and strengthen the phrasing (especially around POV/pronoun use), your essay would be stronger, clearer, and better reasoned."

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