Student Responses

2005 Student Responses

Student Response #1
          Overall I do not think that this response was very well done. The first thing that I noticed was the student's attempt to use elevated language to sound more educated but this ended up making the sentences confusing and muddled the meaning of the essay. They used words like “thersitical”, “syntactic”, and “sentimentality” which make the sentences hard to understand and also make them seem overstated. One of the other things that I noticed about the essay was the organization; it went back and forth between the two poems in a way that was distracting and hard to follow. It would be more beneficial to the essay if it was organized by poem and then brought them together in the end instead of comparing both throughout. Their use of grammar is very informal and incorrect in some places, they use the “&” symbol frequently and also used “w/”, it makes the essay seem too casual for an AP exam. The last thing that I found frustrating about the essay was the first sentence of the second paragraph; it reads “These two poems are comparable stylistically as they both deal quite directly with chimney sweepers.” This sentence seems to be stating the obvious because in the prompt is says to analyze two poems called The Chimney Sweeper, and I think could have been better worded.

Student Response #2
           The second response I read was generally well put together. The organization was a little bit confusing going in between the two poems but that's not to say essay was badly written. I did not care for some of the phrases the author used such as, “such a poet who” and “mistreatment of these young chimney sweeps” as they did not add to the sentence, instead they made them sound choppy and like the sentences have bad sentence structure. They use very good imagery in the essay and connected the imagery of both of the poems. The use of color symbolism is very interesting in the essay, they say things like, “Further along in the first poem, the phrase ‘coffins of black’ enhances the idea that these children are being affected and may establish a metaphor to the black chimneys that children must crawl into.” One thing I did notice was they hardly described the meaning of the two poems in relation to if they were similar or different. Overall, the essay was well written and thoughtfully put together.  

Student Response #3
            My first impression was that the essay was very short, in some cases this is okay but in this one the examples the author gives need to be better explained. In the first paragraph a discussion about the differences in tone should have been elaborated on, clear examples would have helped convince the reader that the tone of the piece did in fact differ between the two poems. The second paragraph is too short, and though it does include evidence it seems very quickly put together and not thought out. They did not discuss any of the techniques that Blake used to create meaning in his poems like imagery or diction. I was very disappointed with the lack of textual evidence and examples. I think the essay could have compared and contrasted the poems a lot more effectively as well. In the last part of the essay I did like how she talked about God and how that was a motif in the poems. The essay in the end was not long enough to compare and contrast the poems effectively, however.