Marcus's Scholarship Paragraph: Three Revision Judgments
Marcus is revising a 96-word paragraph for a scholarship essay limited to 100 words. His draft:
(1) Every Saturday I volunteered at the Riverside food pantry, I learned that hunger is not always visible. (2) The pantry serves 340 families a month, but only 12 percent of them look like what I expected. (3) Families drive up in new cars and then apologize for needing help. (4) It is a big problem in our community. (5) I started asking each family one question: what would make next week easier? (6) Their answers taught me more about poverty than any article I read.
The prompt asks applicants to describe a moment when their understanding changed - not to recommend a policy.
1. Sentence 1 is a comma splice. Write two different repairs that keep the focus on what Marcus learned rather than on the volunteering, and explain the tradeoff between them.
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Repair A (subordination): "Volunteering every Saturday at the Riverside food pantry taught me that hunger is not always visible."
- The volunteering becomes the subject; the lesson lands at the end of the sentence, where English readers expect the new information.
Repair B (coordination): "Every Saturday I volunteered at the Riverside food pantry, and I learned that hunger is not always visible."
- Grammatically clean and preserves his voice and chronology. But the two halves now carry equal weight, so the sentence opens the paragraph dwelling on his schedule rather than his realization.
Tradeoff: B is the smaller edit and sounds more like Marcus; A better serves a prompt about changed understanding because it puts the insight in the stressed final position. For this prompt, A is the stronger choice.
2. Sentence 4 ("It is a big problem in our community") is a candidate for deletion. Argue the case for cutting it, and state what the paragraph loses if it goes.
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Case for cutting:
- "It" has no clear antecedent - hunger? apologizing? the pantry's caseload?
- "Big problem" is an unsupported label; the paragraph's power is in specifics (340 families, 12 percent, new cars), and this sentence substitutes a generality for them.
- It interrupts the movement from observation (3) to action (5). Removing it makes the paragraph read: they apologize → so I started asking questions. Cause and effect, no detour.
What is lost: the only sentence that names the problem as community-wide rather than personal to Marcus. Without it, a reader could read the paragraph as a story about Marcus's assumptions only.
Best resolution: cut the sentence and fold its function into a concrete line, e.g., "The pantry's waiting list is 60 families long." Same breadth, no vague label.
3. A reader might object that asking each family "what would make next week easier?" is intrusive. Does sentence 6 answer that objection? Recommend a change or explain why none is needed.
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It does not answer the objection. Sentence 6 reports what Marcus gained ("taught me more"), not how families experienced the question. The objection is about the families' comfort; the sentence is about Marcus's learning. They pass each other.
What the paragraph already hints: sentence 3 says families "apologize for needing help," which suggests people already feel exposed at the pantry - which makes the intrusiveness question fair rather than fussy.
Recommendation: one short clause showing how he asked, since the word count allows about four more words. For example: "While I bagged their groceries, I started asking each family one question..." Handing over food first shifts the exchange from interrogation to conversation, and it costs fewer than ten words. If the word limit is tight, cut sentence 4 instead and spend the space here.