Ganem TP-6

I met with Dongsoek again on Monday, June 13^th. He had written the essay about whether the death penalty is right or wrong. His argument was that it was wrong. It was a standard five paragraph essay. I went over organization, grammar, and structure.

The introduction was good. He stated that the death penalty was wrong and then went into supporting sentences he wanted to use as main points for the body paragraphs. I looked at the body paragraphs and there were some problems with the organization and structure but they were pretty good.

The first point was that the justice system doesn’t have a right to take away the life the life a human being. He started by saying that the criminal should just be jailed for life if the crime is murder and that is enough of a punishment. This was a good sentence. He continued with this line of thinking by getting into the details o the execution process, using the example of lethal injections. He tried to relate lethal injections to euthanasia. He wrote that humans don’t have a right to kill themselves and euthanasia was wrong. I understood what he was trying to get at; humans shouldn’t kill themselves with the state’s authority so it’s just as wrong for the state to kill criminals. The problem with this was twofold. The paragraph ended abruptly with him simply saying euthanasia was wrong; and it was tangential to the original argument. I explained that even though it may seem related, he can’t use the euthanasia example because his argument is specifically about the death penalty.

His second point was that the death penalty didn’t deter crime. This paragraph made a lot of logical sense. He stated that the death penalty didn’t decrease rape and murder. The only things wrong were grammatical and mechanical errors. He used present tense verbs when he should have used past tense verbs. Some words that were supposed to be plural were singular. Some articles were missing. These were small details that are easily fixed.

The third paragraph was that innocent people have been wrongly sentenced to death and will continue to be wrongly sentenced to death because of the death penalty. He argued that this was unacceptable. Once a mistake like this is made, it can’t be reversed. The possibility for this made the death penalty unjust. This was really a good paragraph but there were mistakes. He meant to use the word “possible” when describing the situation of innocent people being wrongly executed, but he used impossible. Similar grammatical mistakes to the ones in the second body paragraph occurred.

The conclusion restated his thesis and summarized the points from the body. It didn’t need to be fixed. We went over the mistakes that were made. We wrote out sentences that were grammatically and mechanically correct and attempted to reorganize some of the structure from the first body paragraph.

After this, Dongsoek wanted to practice writing something else. I asked him what he was interested in. He told me he was interested in traveling. I told him do a journal activity. He would write about different places he wants to travel to and why he wants to visit them. Dongsoek liked this idea and said he’d have it done before the next time we meet. We then finished our tutoring session and Dongsoek left Strozier to catch his bus.