Thank you, Sally, for participating in the CCD OWL.

The tutor who responded to your paper is Petia Ouzounova.

The tutor's overall impression of your paper:

Dear Sally,

Thanks for your message. It helps us to know what’s going on at your end. We can understand your reluctance to write the paper over again. We’re not suggesting you start over with a blank page because you have a lot of good stuff here, but we do suggest re-organizing what you have. That may sound like a lot to you, but you seem to have a sincere interest in writing well. We believe that if you get clear on how to organize this paper, you will have a tool that you can apply to future papers.

Before we forget, you asked about some =eb and =ed. We don’t have any of those on this end, so maybe they are a computer glitch??? If you ignore them, does the rest make sense? If you want, cut and paste the sentences and email them to us so we can see what's up with that.

The tutor's specific comments about your paper:

Let’s see what we can do to help you with the thesis. The thesis is not just a bunch of questions written down in the first paragraph. In fact, writing questions in an academic paper is not usually the best way to get a point across. However, questions are useful to you, the author, before you start writing. Ask yourself what ideas you want to explain to your reader. The first step in writing a thesis is to identify your purpose and define your audience; what do you want tell someone and who do you want to say it to?

For instance, do you want to focus on just three legal aspects of sexual harassment? (See our first suggestion for the thesis.) Or do you want to tackle the broader focus about how to define sexual harassment, and how the laws affect it, and what victims need to do about it? (See our second suggestion for the thesis.) Just remember that the broader the topic and the more ideas you decide to cover, the easier it is to get lost because you'll have more information to juggle. When you ask yourself which areas you want to focus on, your thesis will come out of your answer. The thesis is a statement that tells the reader exactly which main points will be discussed in the paper. (Often, we see a thesis that contains three main ideas.) We gave you two different suggestions of how you could focus a thesis. Let us give you an example of what a thesis might look like:

“The expense of producing robots, the lack of qualified personnel to service them, and the moral problems of replacing workers with them -- all cloud the future of robots in American industry.”

Obviously, this will be a paper about robots and American industry, but more than that, it will be about three specific areas regarding robots.

See how the author sets up the ideas: Point 1 = the expense of producing robots; Point 2 = lack of qualified service personnel; Point 3 = moral problems of replacing workers. If this is our bus schedule set up in a five paragraph essay, then the thesis will probably be the last sentence of the first paragraph. The second paragraph should start out with a topic sentence about the "expense of producing robots" and focus ONLY on that issue. The next paragraph (the third one) should follow the same pattern but it will focus ONLY on "the lack of qualified personnel to service them." The next paragraph will focus ONLY on "the moral problems." The last paragraph will summarize what has been said in the paper, not add any new information.

As for content of your paper , we think you have already provided a lot of information. One thing that might help is for you to get three different colored hi-liter pens and pick a color to use for each of the three points you want to focus on. For example, you could use pink for the first point, yellow for the second, blue for the third. If your first point is about employer's legal responsibilities, go through your paper and color all the sentences that talk about this issue pink. Then, go through and find all the stuff that deals with your second point, for example, the reasonable person standard, and color those sentences yellow. Finally, find all the sentences that deal with what the victims need to do and color those blue. You may see that your information is spread out all over the place. What you need to do is bring all the pink sentences together in one paragraph, all the yellow into another paragraph and all the blue into another paragraph, so that you have three separate paragraphs. Link them together with some good transitions, and this will be the body of your paper. Then all you have to do is write the introductory paragraph (includes your thesis) and the last (conclusion) paragraph. Sounds much more simple than it feels, huh??

We think if you can do this, you'll have a better understanding of how to organize and structure academic papers. We're here to help you in any way we can. Your teacher asked you to work on paragraph and sentence structure, but if this sounds like too much, let us know, and we will just look at grammar and spelling errors in the original paper you sent us. We both agree your grammar and spelling is pretty right on. Most of the grammar stuff we see is just typing errors. Let us know if you want to re-submit something to us or if you want us JUST to work on spelling and sentence structure in the paper we already have.

Thanks!
Dawn & Petia

If you would like to send email to your tutor, address an email message to owl@ccd.cccoes.edu and include the tutor's name in the subject line.