Zack Wawrzyk -- Time to Change

  You seem to have some good ideas regarding the role of this passage in the overall
  story that Cheryl Strayed is telling in her memoir Wild (although it's sometimes
  hard to really tell because what you say can be hard to undersand -- see below). 
  But you're also sometimes just stating your own (pretty good) interpretation of 
  the overall meaning of the passage without backing it up with a close reading and 
  explanation of exactly what Cheryl Strayed says.  For instance,  *why* does she say 
  "I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed."  What does she mean 
  by "I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself 
  here, I'd done right."  What's the "in getting myself here?"  Why does she feel that 
  she had done right?  You are presenting answers to some of those questions in indirect 
  ways, but it's not coming out in your writing as the  "delv[ing] in detail into a 
  particular passage in the book" that the assignment was asking for.  

  For instance, the "I didn’t feel sad or happy. I didn’t feel proud or ashamed"  seems 
  to me to be mostly numbness from emotional exhaustion at the end of a struggle, or a 
  realization that she has turned a corner and is now on a different path.  She knows 
  that she did the right thing now by undertaking the hike, that going on the hike has     
  started to pull her out of the self-destructive spiral she was in before.  But those 
  problems are still too close and there's still too much for her to do for her to feel 
  happy or proud of what she has done.   The "in spite of all the things I'd done
  wrong, in getting myself here, I had done right" is the real point of the whole passage, 
  I think.  

  Another thing I question and would like to see developed further is your idea that 
  she has accepted "her life errors" at this point. I think you need to say more about 
  that to explain exactly what you mean by it.  I agree she knows for sure that she 
  cannot change what she did in the past or go back to fix things in any obvious way. 
  She doesn't want to go back to her former life.  But the consequences of what
  she did are still deeply painful for her, as you can see in the sentence "That 
  awful moment when Paul and I fell onto the floor after I told him the truth about 
  my infidelities kept coming to me in waves ... "   

  But the main issues I see here are technical ones. (Unfortunately?) "write in your own 
  voice" still means you need to use correct grammar, choose appropriate words, make 
  sure your sentences "work," write clearly enough so that a reader can follow and
  understand your thoughts, and so on.  There are *a lot* of errors and careless 
  things here.  I'm pointing out these just from the first page and the start of the 
  second.  Things are pretty consistent throughout after that point too:

  In the very first sentence "Living a life full of regrets cause much unhappiness
  and stress in one’s life," you want a singular verb "causes" because the abstract
  noun "living" as the subject would be treated as singular.  

  In the second sentence, "could of changed" is incorrect -- should be "could have 
  changed."  (You do the same thing several times later too, so I don't think it's
  a random slip.  Make sure you understand this comment and watch for this in the 
  future.  This is the sort of error that makes a very poor impression!)

  A bit farther along in the first paragraph, "She was a broken women" is incorrect:
  "women" is plural; the singular is "woman."

  Two sentences later "This journey was one she took to find her true self, and she 
  finally both summed up all her failures and accepted them in this passage to show 
  not only to  herself she needed to change but to her late mother"  is very awkward
  because it's wordy and it should probably be split up into at least two different 
  sentences.  Something like: "She took this journey to find her true self.  In this 
  passage, she summed up all of her failures and came to accept them to show herself
  and her late mother that she needed to change."  (At least I think that's what 
  you meant.  It's a bit hard to tell with a sentence that tangled up.)

  After the quotation on page 1, "... passage to the memoir ... " should be 
  "passage in the memoir" or "passage of the memoir"

  Continuing in that sentence, " ... for it conveys deep meaning to how she admits
  what she eventually became" is really unclear -- I really don't know what you 
  were trying to say there, so it's hard to suggest a revision.

  In the last sentence in that paragraph (over on the top of page 2) "using such a 
  justification in order to consciously forgive herself (258) due to her not fully 
  understanding why she acted the way she did" -- first the reference to the quotation
  is out of place (it should come right after the quotation, but that's a pretty 
  minor issue).    The more substantive comment is that this is really confusing 
  too. I'm honestly not sure what you are trying to say there.  

  
  Content/Evidence -- B+

  Structure/Mechanics -- C+