Audrey Holmes -- Wild

  You have done a pretty good job of analyzing the assigned passage from Wild and I 
  think you clearly understand a lot of what Cheryl Strayed was trying to say there.  
  But there is one important point where it is possible to disagree with what you say.  
  In your first paragraph, you state that: "The quote essentially is saying
  that, even though she had committed morally wrong acts in the past, the acts were 
  right because they brought her to take on the challenge of hiking the Pacific Crest 
  Trail."  It's possible to read the passage that way, but I'm not sure that is
  really consistent with other things she says elsewhere, where it is clear that
  she knows she was not doing the right thing in the period after her mother's death
  and that it was not *those acts* themselves that were right (even if what they
  ultimately did was to get her back on track). 
   
  I think something rather different is much more likely as the way to read this sentence.  
  Note that she doesn't just say "I'd done right;" what she said is "in getting myself 
  here, I'd done right."  In your quote at the top of page 3, I see that you left out 
  the "in getting myself here."  I think that might just be an oversight.  But even if 
  you had put that in, you seem to be reading the "in getting myself here" as meaning 
  everything she had done up to that point in her life.  As I said above, that's possible.  
  But it's more plausible to me that "getting myself here" refers specifically to her decisions 
  to leave Paul, make the hike, and to stick to the hike when it got difficult.  I think 
  she wants us to take away the message that it was the hike that got her back to the 
  person she was before all of her problems; it was the hike itself that let her grow up 
  into a responsible adult.  

  Your writing is generally very good here.  But I think you have fallen into 
  something of a trap a few times with phrases like "morally wrong acts," 
  "atrocities," "life ridden with secret adulterous lust," and the like.  
  Those are really "loaded" phrases and they give the paper a moralistic tone 
  that I'm not sure you intended.  If you did intend them that way, then I think 
  you're being pretty harsh.  As I said, I think Cheryl Strayed knows very well
  how wrong some of the things she did were.  You can see that in her descriptions
  of how she felt about herself when she was doing heroin, and how she felt about
  breaking up her marriage with Paul.  She's actually being pretty courageous
  in acknowledging all of those mistakes, so I think she deserves more compassion. 

    Content/Evidence -- B+

    Structure/Mechanics -- A