Mary McGregor -- Sixty is the New Twenty

  In thinking about the Mark Twain quotation that was part of the prompt
  for this assignment, I'm very glad you were able to understand that Twain was
  first and foremost a "humorist" and a satirist -- his primary goal in almost everything 
  he said and wrote was *to make people laugh* at others and at themselves, 
  and then to get them to think about how silly a lot of their preconceptions 
  and actions are.   So it seems clear to me that his idea that aging in reverse 
  would lead to an "infinitely happier life" is not really a serious proposal. It's 
  a way to get us to laugh about the indignities of aging.  Then he wants us to think 
  about whether being young is really any better than being old and whether life 
  really would be any better "in reverse."  And even so, as you point out (and as 
  Twain certainly intended) raising these questions almost forces us to take a
  critical look at life.

  I think you're probably still taking Twain a little too seriously, but your 
  essay relating to this idea from the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
  has many good points.  You have thought deeply about the story and you have developed 
  a strong and detailed understanding of how it works and what it tries to say.  You 
  do a good job of pointing out ways that Benjamin's story essentially shows that what 
  Twain is saying is not true at all on the literal level.  
  
  You also clearly see that the main issue for Benjamin is not just that he is
  aging "in reverse."  It's that he is an single individual living "in reverse" in a world 
  of people aging in the normal direction.  So he faces obstacles you discuss at almost 
  every step of the way.  Even though he has many of the same physical-age-appropriate 
  experiences as other people, his physical appearance and condition are always 
  out of step with his mental age *from the point of view of those other people*.    
  So it's not just the direction of aging by itself that is the really important 
  point.  It's how that direction of aging makes you in step or out of step with 
  everyone around you that really matters for how things play out in this story. 

  Your writing is generally excellent too.  I think some of the later paragraphs
  get slightly repetitive, though.  For instance you make the point that aging
  in reverse might actually be preferable if we were all doing it together several
  times.  Did you feel as though you were needing to "pad" things to get to three 
  pages?  There are also a few minor issues about agreement between subject and verb, or 
  consistency of tenses within paragraphs.  For instance, from the first paragraph:  
  In "One cannot watch this film without pondering questions of one’s own lives and 
  whether or not the “normal” aging process is how it should be"  the "one's own 
  lives" should be "one's own life" (we each have only one life, after all!)  Then similarly 
  in "Or are we better off accepting the eventual downfalls of our bodies?"  I think 
  "downfalls" sounds a bit odd since it sounds as though each of us might have more 
  than one such downfall. Making the "downfall" singular would be better.

  Content -- A

  Structure/Mechanics -- A-