Marzan 1

Adam Marzan

Dr. Karen Dolnick

ENGL101

01 December 2016

After Action Assessment: Essay 1

After receiving feedback from the instructor on the Definition essay assignment, it is with

great pride to say, there were many more positive notes than there were negative. According to

the rubric comments provided, the essay structure had a solid foundation and was free of

mechanical errors. Both body and conclusion had a smooth flow of information. Leaving the

reader to further think about the topic. Sources were cited correctly and the sentence structure

showed maturity.

Although a majority of the assignment received positive feedback, there is always room

for improvement. An essay's introduction should act as a road map for the reader. This

introduction for the graded assignment was a road map to nowhere. Dr. Dolnick writes “The

introduction did not really introduce all of the rest of the essay.” There were also facts in the

introduction that had nothing to do with the rest of the essay (Dolnick). After reviewing previous

weekly lessons and readings, the mistakes made were clearly visible. The introduction did not

answer who, what, when, why, or the how of the topic and there were also facts about 2014’s

population of the United States which had nothing to do with an essay on “Life.” In order to

grow and develop better writing skills, the attention should be focused on the beginning of the

essay.

While conducting research on how to make the introduction better, two YouTube videos

that proved to be helpful are located at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR5VCSuerVQ and

 Marzan 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D28fPKiWuy8. Both videos explain the basics of a good

introduction. The plan is to watch and study these links until the basics of writing an introduction

come naturally. Step two in the homework plan is to learn how to increase the interest of the

reader. Week two's definition essay started off very bland and lacked a hook. Both an article by

Nicole Palmby “5 Types of Attention Getters in Essays” and Study.com encouraged using a

quotation from a famous person or humor as a hook. Humor would be an outstanding hook

because if you can make a person laugh, you already have their attention. The final step in the

plan is to work on using correct grammar. By reviewing the previous course lessons and our

Write Now text book by Russell, at the end of this class, there shouldn’t be any incorrectly placed

commas. The goal for the near future is to have a much more interesting introduction for the

week five assignment.

You wrote an incredibly well written informative essay which I thoroughly enjoyed even though I knew about most
of the material.

The strong points of your essay were:

1. The thesis statement introduced the essay very well.

2. The essay flowed well from the thesis statement
3. The paper was very well organized
4. It held the reader's attention from beginning to end
5. The introduction and conclusion were good
6. MLA formatting, including the works cited page, was very good

The elements of the paper that need attention are:

1. There were very few errors in the paper

2. The plural of the words, "scientist and exist" need to have an "s" at the end. All words that end in "ist" need
to have an "s" at the end if they are plural.

That is about it. When you do your second after action assessment, in addition to the one error, just share some of
the things you would still like to learn about English.
 Marzan 3

Works Cited

Dolnick, Karen. "After Action Assessment Assignment." Message to the author. 30 Nov. 2016. E-

mail.

Palmby, Nicole. "5 Types of Attention Getters in Essays." The Classroom | Synonym. Leaf

Group Ltd, n.d. Web. 01 Dec. 2016.

"Attention Getters for Essays: Types & Examples." Study.com. Study.com, n.d. Web. 02 Dec.
2016.