Zoo Paper Analysis - Essay Example

I think that you should have expounded it more instead of jumping right away to your thesis. As suggested in the Argument Lecture, the thesis sentence should not be placed in the beginning of the essay; instead a good argument should come at the end of the sentence. In your paper, you immediately stated your thesis statement at the second paragraph stating, “It is morally wrong to keep wild animals in captivity”. In fact, you already hinted at it already at the first paragraph when you said, “No amount of replication, no matter how convincing, is enough to make up for denying these creatures their freedom.

” You also expressed, “The argument is simple: The fact that we are stronger or smarter than animals does not give us the right to ambush and exploit them solely for the purposes of our own entertainment.” Since your audience is adversarial, it is not right for you to impose your belief to them at the start of your essay. You should have established your points of argument first before stating your thesis statement. You failed to take note of the point in the Argument Lecture which said that in a great argument, the thesis is never explicitly stated.

A positive point of your paper is that you were able to use cause and affect language in your essay. An example of this is when you said that “most animals in captivity cannot go back in the wild”. The cause here is the captivity which resulted to an effect of not being able to go back in the wild. Another cause and effect statement which you presented is that because of inbreeding in zoos, the offspring is often weakened. Your essay also stated a very good Point of Agreement in the third paragraph when you stated, “We humans take our own freedom quite seriously.

” I would commend this statement because indeed your audience will agree to it because it is a given fact. It does not even mention anything about your desire to abolish zoos. In the same paragraph you also stated a Point of Disagreement, “But too many of us apparently feel no obligation to grant that same right to animals…” The third paragraph is a good example of AGREEMENT --> DISAGREEMENT. Reading the whole paper though, I think that you lack statements of Agreements. You concentrated more on Points of Disagreement.

Maybe you should add more Points of Agreement so as not to intimidate your audience especially at the start of the paper. Another point which I want to mention and remind you is that “an argument is not a debate”. You did not have to present both sides of the argument like what you did in discussing about the case Jackie, the dolphin. As I was reading through your paper, I got confused as to what argument you were really presenting. Especially in the last four paragraphs of your essay, I was beginning to think that what you were fighting for was about the preservation of endangered species.

You deviated from your previous argument about zoos being abolished. You jumped to a new topic about the destruction of the natural habitats of animals. There are now so many issues being presented so much so that you are already confusing your audience on what you really want them to do. Is it to abolish zoos, protect the ecosystem or is it the preservation of endangered species? Maybe you should have written another argumentative essay on these topics and just concentrate on the abolition of zoos in your essay.

It is hard to persuade your audience if you confuse them with too many issues. Based on the above comments, the grade that I will give you is F because you failed to follow some of the basic guidelines which was presented in the Argument Lecture. Because of that, I cannot give you a high grade since from the start of your essay you have been out