Joshua O’Crowley workshop

Overall

Hi Jousha I just read your second draft and I'm here to help you workshop it.

First off, I like the topic of your paper, it's very current and you talk about some very important relationships. The structure of your paper is good; however, you seem to use a lot of redundant sentences throughout. There are quite a few subject object arguments grammar mistakes, and a lack of proper citation. Also, you continually shift the targeted reader by making many definitive statements "we" or "us" meaning "Us as the world" and "Us as Americans". This makes it quite confusing.

Is there anything particular that you feel you wanted help with? If so please e-mail me at fssar7@uaf.edu

Thesis

I can't find an although statement, so I assume that your thesis statement is in the bottom part of your first paragraph where you start saying "Would it cost us less now to start…". This needs to be fleshed out and put into proper format with an although statement. Perhaps, "Although the cost of starting new renewable energy programs can be expensive…".

You seem to identify with those who would promote energy renewable resources but you don't flesh out both sides of the argument very completely.

Content

I found this paper to be a 7 out of 10 for being interesting to read. Lots of good information but you need to cite properly otherwise it doesn't mean anything. You talk a lot about exciting renewable energy sources but you don't flesh out how they might be implemented which in my opinion is the most interesting part. You could enhance this part of your essay by looking at a few interesting renewable energy sources and researching what they are currently doing to make them available to the public.

You don't seem to look at the negatives to these reports other than mentioning how current energy policies were enacted in your third paragraph, and you don't really talk about technology for unrenewable resources. Also all of these paragraphs seem to be going in the same direction, each topic sentence refers back to how much we currently use. Try to move all of this to one section then develop all of your other paragraphs around a specific issue.

Because you don't really have a thesis statement it's hard to figure out how well this all relates to each other.

Style

You do a lot of jumping around defining who "we" are throughout the paper; this is distracting at least to me, maybe not to other. In your second paragraph your style changes when you describe the energy bills, be careful with paraphrasing to make sure it's rewritten in your own words, just removing one or two words isn't enough you should RESTATE IT completely.

This sections here "These laws changed previous energy policies by deregulating oil and gas prices; imposing energy efficiency standard for appliances, giving tax credits; loans and grants for residential solar heating and energy conservation improvements; required that electric utilities buy back power generated from personally owned energy generators; a…"

Be careful how you define energy, perhaps it would be better to classify what kind of energy, steam, electric mechanical. You don't explicitly define energy in your opening sentences and that makes it difficult to read.

I don't really see a concluding paragraph here, perhaps you should split the last part of your final paragraph into 2.

Research

I only count you using 3 citations throughout perhaps (Alternate Fuels?) Is a citation but I can't tell the difference between your parenthetical to your citations because they are not in the right format. And there is no works cited so it's impossible for me to tell how many you are using.

I hope this has helped you, let me know if there's anything else you need.