After reading this example student paper, I think the main message of the author is that students environment my be increasing racial injustice. This point is made very clear and the author uses many case studies to back up this claim. He compares two different schools that have different racial populations and takes a close examine of a combination of survey questions and environmental differences between the schools. These points made help to boost the ethos and support his claim.
The author utilizes a survey he conducted as primary research for the basis of the essay. He also uses a semiotic analysis in order to show the differences between the two schools. The evidence concluded about the schools is very effective in my personal opinion; however, there are some changes that I would suggest to make the paper stronger. He ends a paragraph with a quote, which is something that I think is bad because it makes no sense. There is no explanation of the quote that way and so it seems as though he is adding the quote randomly into the paper and makes it confusing as to why it is there.
The author makes his claims credible through the people he quotes, who are credible people such as school officials. He also uses statistics that help to clarify the racial differences between the two schools.
The style of this paper overall is well written and I liked it a lot. It was easy to read and organized in a smart way. One thing that I think could use a little help is the thesis. This paper needs an evolving thesis and I felt like after reading his I knew for the most part what the rest of the paper was going to be about, not much was there to intrigue me to continue reading the essay. Other than that I felt the authors writing was good and the paper read fluently.
There are a lot of sources used in this paper that does boost the ethos, but I think the author may have used too many sources for a paper this short. The citing and in text annotations are correctly done. Overall I would probably give this paper a B+ because although it is a strong paper, the number of sources for a paper of this length does take away from the paper slightly. He integrates his primary and secondary sources into the paper well and for the most part does a good job explaining them well to back up his claim. However, as stated before the thesis does not seem to be evolving and is basically a layout of the rest of the paper, which also takes away from the paper.
