Francois Venne -- "Back to Neutral"

Excellent work!  You have developed a very satisfying interpretation of the assigned
passage.  The idea that Cheryl Strayed needs to make a break with her past in order
learn to control and harness the impulsiveness in her character seems exactly right to me.
She does need get "back to neutral" in order to move on with her adult life, and that
makes it impossible for her to consider resuming her relationship with Paul, even though
that was probably the most positive part of what she had before.  You have also done a very 
good job of relating that passage with the rest of the book with your chosen quotations 
and references.

I have a few mechanical comments -- there are several times when you use direct
quotations but you need to make a lot of changes to fit the grammar of the sentences
you want to write.  You are doing that completely correctly from the technical 
standpoint.  But if you need to do a lot of that to make things work, it's probably
better not to use the direct quotation.   It becomes a chore to read some of 
those chopped-up and reworded sentences.  Paraphrasing is OK in that situation; you 
can still put in a reference to the page where the passage you are drawing from 
is located.  Also, you cite the following passage from page 58, "the despair, 
the alienation, the anxiety and especially the pain, both physical and mental," 
referring to what PCT hikers can expect to experience.  If you look back at exactly 
what Cheryl Strayed says there, you will see that while this comes from the 
PCT guide book, that book is actually itself quoting another author, Charles Long.  
(This is really a small point for the purposes of this essay, but for other sorts
of writing in college courses and scholarly writing in general, it will be important 
to pay close attention to attribution of quotations.)


   Content/Evidence -- A

   Structure/Mechanics -- A