Grapes of Wrath – Essential Questions Response
Woody Guthrie somewhat satirically claims that we share the land in his song, “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land” – however I do not believe that to be entirely true. Firstly I believe, that land isn’t quite a tangible object for purchase, it really doesn’t make sense to me at all how we let people reap the bounties of the earth by buying everything up, chopping down all the trees, paving it with cement & apartment complexes. But if land has to belong to a person, it should belong to the inhabitant – it should belong to someone who cares about the land itself, rather than just the profit. So, in a Grapes of Wrath context, this means that the land should belong to the tenant farmers – that the bankers shouldn’t have been allowed to scoop up all the land and sell it to the poor for so much. It also means that the tenant farmers should take care of it because they have been the ones that have so carefully labored over it for months, soothing to bring sprouts, singing to bring stalks, crying to bring rain and fruit. The bankers, the overseers – they do not care about the land, they have really invested nothing except for money, but we all know how tempting that sly chick can be.
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Peer Reviews
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Quality of writing
The Quality of Written Communication here is very good. The candidate makes only very infrequent minor errors, none of which compromise the clarity of written expression. There is a good adherence to the rules of spelling and grammar and punctuation, but again I insist candidates read and re-read their work to ensure even small errors are ironed out before the final hand-in date.
Level of analysis
The Level of Analysis is not marked here, but the Level of Argument is, so I shall evaluate this. The candidate's argument is good, and comes across as very confident and sure of what it is trying to achieve. The rhetoric used is powerful and does exclude itself to simply question format. The candidate also uses a number of other techniques all of which combine to make an effective argument. My only quandary is that there is no appreciation of the counter-argument or an understanding of another point of view. Whilst this may be attributed to such a strong viewpoint that the candidate does not consider anyone else's, it limits the extent to which the candidate can be fully tested for arguing skills because they do not prove they can rationalise their argument when confronted with an opposing view.
Response to question
This is a very succinct answer, written by a candidate who exercises great confidence in their writing ability. the candidate's written expression is fluid and expressed with a great argumentative flair because of their use of reference points from well-known songs and books in order to elaborate their argument for the value of agriculture and arable farming. The answer uses a number of arguing techniques that help form an effective argument such as statistics and hyperbole, and this really drives home the enthusiasm for the topic being argued, as well as showing the examiner that there has been external research done to fortify the answer.
