Isabel Block -- A Wild Journey 

   Your choice of passage to write about was an excellent one.  I think you 
   have done a great job analyzing the metaphor of the bare hands reaching for
   the fish in the water.  Cheryl Strayed uses this first to describe her attempts 
   to understand the meanings in the poems in The Dream of a Common Language by 
   Adrienne Rich and then to describe her attempts to understand her own situation 
   at the end of the trip.  The message that it is OK to wait for answers to 
   the big questions is an important one and we could all probably learn from 
   that to some extent.

   Your writing here is significantly improved over the Huckleberry Finn paper,
   I think. Good job, but see the third comment below.

   A few specific comments:

   1)  In your first sentence, I'm not sure exactly why the phrase "and like the 
   rest of the world" is there.  What did you want to say with that?  It's certainly
   true that the rest of the world continues today, but how does that relate to 
   your passage?

   2)  On page 2, you say:  "The metaphor personifies Cheryl’s feeling that she was 
   close to finding meaning in the words of the poems, although the only tools she 
   had to do this were the bare minimum, but whenever she reached in to find the answers, 
   she failed to find what she is searching for."   You're getting to the real "meat"
   of the metaphor here.  However, this is a run-on sentence -- it should be broken 
   up into two or more separate sentences.  It would be good to break after the "bare 
   minimum."   Moreover, the word "personify" is not exactly what you want because 
   the metaphor is not introducing a person who represents a quality or an idea (that's 
   the primary meaning of "personify").  I can see choosing a better word here might
   have been difficult, though, because of the way you wanted to put this sentence.
   Something like:  "The metaphor illustrates Cheryl's feeling ... " would work, I 
   think.  

   3)  I don't think the last three sentences of your concluding paragraph add very
   much because they all touch on things you said before.  Sometimes saying things
   in shorter and more direct ways is much better than "filling out" a paragraph.  


   Content/Evidence -- A

   Structure/Mechanics -- A-