Comment:
This essay demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the subtleties of spoken and text-based communication. It also communicates, in many cases, with clarity and precision – allowing you to express a wide range of ideas, and to extend and develop these ideas, in relatively few words. Some of your phrasing is particularly effective in its capacity to show the specific relationship between the features and ideas that you discuss, like “for the most part”. You have also structured complex sentences in order to carry the high level of sophistication of your ideas. Your examples are original and effective. You extend beyond the specifics of the language analysis into exploration of the social and cultural position of language and do so, in many cases, with confidence and strong effect.
To develop your work in the future, you may wish to:
- Develop an introduction that clarifies the point of the essay more, as well as signifies to the reader the broader nature of the discussion that will follow. This means both making it more detailed as an outline of your points, as well as taking the opportunity to state your view.
- Increase further the frequency and detail of your quotations and examples
- Continue to consider the implications of the points you make in essays. Think “If what I’m saying is true, what effect would this have…?”
- Occasionally your, largely excellent, writing style trips up – and sentences are left with minor syntax errors. I’d like to go over these with you close to the time of the next formal assessment as I’m sure we can further build on your existing strengths in formal writing.