Darcy’s AP Comp Blog

I feel rather happy with my essay, which is surprising because there wasn’t a single timed write last year when I was happy with my result.

That doesn’t mean I did well, but it means I was happy with it.

I think, though, that I probably need improvement on moving from source to source, or drawing my arguments from the sources themselves. I tended to come up with my own arguments, reasoning, and examples. It became a struggle to find points in the articles that made the same points I wanted to make.

Summary: Society and government are not the same thing. Society is good and encourages goodness, while government is bad and discourages lawlessness. Government is necessary, but only society would be preferable if such a thing were possible. Society gets things done. Government gives the same issues that lack of government does.

Rhetorical Strategies:
“Government, like dress” is code grooming; “is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise” is metaphor; there is parallel structure in several places, such as “society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices”;

FREEDOM’S JUST ANOTHER WORD
Fact: less than 51% of Americans participate in the voting process.
Claim: America should make voting mandatory.
Backing: Optional and unimportant are seen as synonymous in America.
Making voting mandatory would increase turnout
When free voting always there, it’s taken for granted.
Warrant: More people would show up to vote if it were required.

THE $114.69 SPEECH POLICE
Fact: A student running for office at his university was not allowed to keep the office because he spent $114.69 more than the limit of spending allowed by the school.
Claim: He should have been able to spend $214.69 if he wanted to.
Backing: The posters he was fighting against didn’t have a limit of their own.
Warrant: The $100 limit doesn’t make any sense

And they both randomly mentioned food…. what was up with that?

My campaign manager has recently been discovered as a corrupt Money talks, and my campaign manager’s money is saying bad things.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men”
Right off, he introduces a persona for himself. He explains who he is, what he thinks, and why. Then he goes on to state the point he is arguing. What he is doing is the opposite of expressing disinterest. He’s saying that he’s right, and that others should come to think more like him. And he convinces not through disinterest, but through stating facts to support him, pointing out thing that, when looked at all together, make the point he is trying to make seem not only right but obvious.

“Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.”
It says reduce other things in proportion, but these two examples aren’t in proportion to themselves! Which should ‘other things’ be reduced by.
Sorry, just had to get that out of my system. Anyway, this is an example of parallel structure. ‘instead of [number] [noun], [number]’ on each side of the semicolon. This gives two examples of the same concept, and the structure compares the two examples and shows that they are the same concept by clumping them together and relating them to each other merely by using the same sentence structure.

“For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life — I wrote this some years ago — that were worth the postage. ”
Here, he is using his own personal experience to back up his claims. He doesn’t necessarily say that his own experiences might be true for other people, but he tells his own stories and gives reasons for his own beliefs.

space saver