Response to “What If Drugs Were Legal”

In response to Gabrielle’s post, I agree with her in that we should take a more sensitive approach to critiquing other people’s work. However, I think that the reason why our class was so critical and blunt about this paper was because the writer of the paper was not present. If the writer had been in the classroom, I feel strongly that our class would have taken a lighter approach in discussing this paper. Our class’s reaction is an example however, of how we can let out emotions and initial reactions get in the way of getting down to what really matters in analyzing an essay. Instead of focusing on the degree of “goodness” or “badness” in a paper, we should focus more so on why a paper is good or bad. In doing this, we will be better able to help the reader understand why they need to adjust their paper. If they can understand their mistakes in a broader sense, the writer will be able to apply what the critic taught them to their future writing.

The writer in “What if Drugs Were Legal” clearly needed some assistance in the structure and content in his/her paper, however like Gabrielle noted, I don’t think that the writer was too far off from creating an acceptable piece of writing. One of the reasons why I feel this way was because when I was reading the piece I was almost convinced that this was a notable piece of work, since we were not told previously that this paper was flawed and unscholarly. If it had been completely awful, I would have immediately thought that this was an example of “bad writing” and most likely would have gone through correctly it, grammatically and structurally. Since the piece did bring up valid points (however lacking support), I only responded to the piece with my opinions on the subject of legalizing drugs. If it were not for the obvious grammatical errors, I would have not been as skeptical of this piece. Maybe I am alone in my assumptions when first reading this piece, but I think that my initial submission to believing that this fallible work contained legitimacy, is an example of how easily people can be manipulated by what they are told is “correct.” Or in this situation, by what we weren’t told was “correct” or “incorrect.”