Practice Exam 1 "revision strategies"

This piece is a letter written to the administrators of a local university by very upset students that are enrolled at this university. The letter is written in regards to a possible policy change requiring the students to engage in a certain amount of community service hours prior to graduations. These unidentified students are very strongly opinionated and express their opinions quite strongly and stay on topic to where their points are heard and clearly understood. However, there are a number of local and global concerns that make this letter very difficult to take seriously in regards to punctuation, spelling and grammar. 

First, to address a few of the local strengths, the reader can clearly understand the students' position on the matter. However, there are many local concerns about this letter as well. One of those concerns being the plethora of spelling, grammar and punctuation errors. In the very first paragraph, the reader can't help but to cringe when noticing the use of "Their" instead of "There" "your" as opposed to "you're" and "waist" when the correct word is "waste" (1).

In addition to misuse of words, there are also punctuation errors where colons are used when periods should be used instead. Also, there are unnecessary commas are littered throughout the writing (1). Unfortunately this is not a problem that is native to the first paragraph, the reader can see these spelling, punctuation and grammar errors throughout the entirety of this letter.

In regards to the global strengths, one can take one look at this letter written by these unidentified college students and see the outrage that they have towards this idea of community service. The writer did well in informing the readers not only what their position is on the matter, but the writer also addresses their perspective from a number of different ways. Anything ranging from taking away from studious endeavors to extra curricular activities, dating and personal relaxation time (5). However, the letter seems a bit choppy with a lack of transition statement between body paragraphs.

In conclusion, one can clearly understand the unidentified students' position on the matter of community service requirements. One can also see the reasoning behind the writers position due to several aspects of the students' position. However, one may strongly encourage the writer to evaluate his/her letter and correct the several grammar, spelling and punctuation errors in order to have a more sophisticated and convincing letter to the administration.