Young Writers Society

*stunned silence*
*round of applause*
*standing ovation for one minute*
*Two*
*Three*
*Four*
*Standing ovation for 50 years*

Wow...just wow. That was amazing. You hit the nail right on the head. I love you. You may be my favourite writer now.

Wow! This was wonderfully written and an exceedingly powerful piece of work. You managed to make me angry, sad and a whole lot of other things in such as short space of time. It takes something pretty special to evoke those kind of thoughts and emotions.
You've got a good message behind this, and have managed to make the reader use their imagination and to sypathise with others. Great work!

Hey there, Matthew.

So I have to say when I first started reading this I was quite happy to see it was something relating to Schindler's List and that whole era. It can be a pretty powerful topic for one to take on, therefore I'm always intrigued to see how certain writers go about things. I like to see what points they're trying to bring up most strongly and how certain events being discussed effected them once learning about them. I think you did a fine job of expressing your point here, but I also think there's some room for improvement in places.

I noticed a few of your sentences and even a few paragraphs here and there seemed a little too wordy and explanative. I think that when you have precise thoughts you're meaning to get out, as a writer you should strive to get them out in the most interesting and eye-catching way possible. Some of your words stood a little weak in my eyes in the sense that I felt myself beginning to lose interest as this seemed more of a bit of a ramble at times. History isn't my forte, sadly, though when writers build their message in an interesting pattern, I usually find it hard to not grow stuck to the page! I think that's sort of what I wished I could see here. I could see you starting to amble on in that direction, then you'd go on about some thought or point or other. I think all of what you're saying should build its point very gradually and organically. No need to explain as you're going on. Let the paragraphs stitch themselves together into a whole before unraveling the enormous gist of it all.

Though I am probably just being picky when I point these things out, I do think you did a wonderful job here and it is definitely something to be enormously proud of. One of the hard things to do sometimes is edit. I think that by going back through this and smoothing out some of the edges you'll definitely have a stunning piece of work. I did catch one nitpick here:

Are [you] willing to put your head above the trenches?

There was a missing word there, but no big deal. Just thought I would include that before I decided to wrap this up here. All in all, nice work, Matthew. Keep up the power pieces.

-Smylin'

I'll start off with an admission: I haven't seen Schindler's List. If it was a book first, I've never read it. If it's based on a real person, I've never heard of him. But this was a beautiful essay. You stated your case well.

However, as an "experienced" college essay writer/grader, the one thing I noticed right away was that there was no thesis statement. At no point in the essay, especially in the first two or three paragraphs, I didn't see one sentence that described what this essay was trying to prove. Maybe that wasn't part of this essay, but it still threw me off a little bit. The inclusion of a thesis statement gives your essay direction, and allows readers like me to know what the point of the essay is.

That being said, you use plenty of examples, and you have a clear direction to the essay, and, like I said earlier, you state and support your case very well. I especially like the use of examples throughout history, illustrating that this sort of injustice doesn't happen only once. I especially loved this line:

I believe uprightness is defined by being in paradox. And that paradox is... lowering yourself to lift someone else up.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Congrats.

KF