7/21 academic book review feedback

    Today we checked our feedback for our academic book review. My grade for the essay was not bad, but a little disappointing because I spent a long time working on it. I think the reason for this is because I used a lot of personal pronouns and had consecutively used words. We were taught that using first-person singular pronouns (e.g. I, my) is fine because the essay is about our opinion, but we aren't speaking for other people, so we can't use "we" or "us". I wasn't aware of these problems when I was writing the essay, and this is bad because Mr.Paterson pointed out the same thing for the last essay assignment. It was easy to fix these problems. 

There are also other things that I need to change. Firstly my introduction/conclusion paragraphs are too short, and the summary/critique paragraphs are too long. I wrote a short summary in the introduction paragraph, so if I exclude that part, my introduction paragraph will only be 11 lines (which is about 1/3 of a page) and my summary/critique paragraphs are longer than a page. For the introduction, I think I will write about Tolkien's 3Bs more in detail. For the conclusion, I'll make it longer by adding things that I wrote in the critique. It's difficult to reduce the length of the summary paragraph because if I do, the readers wouldn't understand the important points. Moreover, in the preface of "The Hobbit", it says that "In English the only correct plural of dwarf is dwarfs and the adjective is dwarfish. In this story dwarves and dwarvish are used, but only when speaking of the ancient people to whom Thorin Oakenshield and his companions belonged". Therefore I think what I wrote is right but this "dwarfs or dwarves" problem doesn't really matter because people use both these terms, so I'm just going to delete the part. Fortunately, I only had a few feedback for the summary/critique paragraphs so I think that means these paragraphs were OK.

    Then, we were taught about the importance of quoting/writing references. Mr.Paterson said even if the essay was super fantastic, single plagiarism would make the essay an F. I thought that was very horrifying because the precious time spent on writing an essay becomes worthless. Therefore I will continue to be aware of plagiarism. I also wondered if university students can write an essay without any plagiarism because if we aren't allowed to plagiarize, even accidentally, the more people write essays, the chances of plagiarizing unintentionally will increase.