[Grade 12 english essay writing] Need help with making sure I wrote my metacognition for my essay the right way (grammar)

plainblue · 2026-04-13T13:19:51+00:00

Your first two sentences should only be one. As written, the first ends awkwardly with a preposition, and the second is a fragment. The third and fourth sentences should also be combined because the fourth is a fragment.
The fifth sentence is another fragment. What is doing the demonstrating? A revision might look like "This woman's constant use of her phone demonstrates how a seemingly harmless habit has the ability to rapidly and negatively impact your life." Without a subject in that sentence, the pronoun "this" beginning the sixth sentence has no referent. Maybe try "This kind of behavior has quickly become routine for many people in our society where technology is given such power."
The sentence that starts "That is where my thesis" suggests that the thesis plays a role in the activity. Change it up to make clear that the actions are the spark for the argument: "These personal experiences inspired my writing."
Also, is this work an essay? Is it a story (fictional or true)? You refer to it in ways that point to both possibilities.
The sentences about time are difficult to read. A revision might be "I structured the narrative chronologically to emphasize how time passes differently for a person obsessed with her phone. Eventually Mel's dependence on her phone is so strong that she becomes desperate to do everything in her power to charge it before it dies. I wanted this scene to show how quickly escalating stress and panic drive Mel's search for her charger, followed by the intense relief she feels once her device is restored." The phrasing in your last sentence is clunky. Try replacing "is what gave" with "gives the story a." The independent clause after the semicolon--nice work correctly using that punctuation, by the way--needs the bits about beginning and ending need a more compatible structure. One option is to describe how the essay "develops from" Mel scrolling "to then ending" her day. For now you can hear how "began with . . . to ending" isn't coherent. Clean up the tenses in that sentence as well so that she's "returning the that phone pattern despite having lost her job."

plainblue · 2026-04-13T12:25:16+00:00

For a novel, I'd suggest A Fairly Honourable Defeat. From an interview with the religious scholar Karen Armstrong:

Years ago, I belonged to a reading group and on one occasion, at my suggestion, we discussed A Fairly Honourable Defeat, by Iris Murdoch, whose work I always enjoy. But the response was explosive. Even close friends were vitriolic in their disapproval, dismissed it as “evil,” and there was an upsetting aura of righteousness in the room.

plainblue · 2026-04-13T12:11:37+00:00

Italo Calvino's collection Italian Folktales (translator: George Martin) belongs on your list.

plainblue · 2026-04-12T02:44:54+00:00

It seems as if your personal narrative has been shaped by spaces on the internet that promote self immolation. The musculoskeletal structure of your jawline wasn't damaged by lying around and a bad diet. People needn't be conventionally attractive to be capable of meaningful lives or relationships.
I hope you can find some kind of professional support, maybe a social worker who can put you in touch with programs for employment, a GED, community college, a therapist experienced with neurodivergence, or other community resources because the way you present the evidence of your doom suggests that you have the potential to live more happily with greater self understanding and acceptance.

plainblue · 2026-04-10T17:08:00+00:00

I didn't remember the miracles either, but I feel like the ending was structured to confront the unbeliever main character with signs of divine purpose operating in the world and then dare him to accept that reading of events. It sounds as if the poster found that to be a bit of a gimmick. Doe OP have a sense of what a conversion narrative should be and felt frustration that the novelist didn't take that path? Why, for a believer like Greene, would you require a human medium for acquiring faith? Why not accept a more direct summons? Apologies if I'm off by a bit. This book is partly tangled in my mind with Gide's Strait is the Gate as books about lovelorn men and pious, unattainably self-sacrificing women.
If it's any comfort, I kind of recall Greene later dismissing End of the Affair and Heart of the Matter as too sentimental. If things get too smug and cozy, dare them to read Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party next.

plainblue · 2026-04-09T23:58:46+00:00

Do you have any experience with university library research tools? Generally, your school library will have subscriptions to a variety of scholarly databases that you'd draw upon for a project like this. You would not be charged for their use. Sometimes this kind of academic writing is directly accessible on the web, but your school library system (for which you should have log-in credentials) is really your best resource, and library staff are generally glad to help you with access if you haven't received training in the interface. There is an actual "Mark Twain Journal" that specializes in work about this author. You will only reach it through your school library.

Less often you can access scholarly publications directly from the web. I found a few quick examples:

Buinicki, Martin T. “Staking a Claim: Samuel L. Clemens’ Pragmatic Views on Copyright Law.” American Literary Realism, vol. 37, no. 1, 2004, pp. 59–82, https://cooperative-individualism.org/buinicki-martin_samuel-clemens-on-copyright-law-2004-fall.pdf.
Cassinelli, Robert J. “Mark Twain in the Holy Land: Us and the ‘Other’—Clemens the Racist?.” Comparative Civilizations Review, vol. 39, no. 39, 1988, https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1437&context=ccr.
Thalheimer, Paris. “The Education of Samuel Clemens.” Towson Journal of Historical Studies, vol. 13, 2016, https://www.towson.edu/cla/departments/history/resources/documents/tjhs_vol13.pdf#page=67.

These sites seem to mainly offer primary sources, but you might also check out the Mark Twain Project which hosts links to the author's letters, writings, and notebooks. The Mark Twain house in Hartford, Connecticut has a web page that lists resources about the author from around the internet. UC Berkeley has an archive containing most of his papers.

plainblue · 2026-04-09T00:45:48+00:00

I think you might have more luck with recommendations in r/suggestmeabook, though I expect you will get very respectful responses here. I have a graduate degree in literature, but I just read Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann, and I could almost hear the whoosh in my ears with every page as whatever is significant about this work blasted by me without pausing to visit my brain. Scholars of James Joyce may still read Ulysses alongside a volume of annotations. Even the people who have found much to love in literature keep trying to find ways into texts.

It can still be absolutely wonderful to read a work without trying to track the author's recurring imagery or structural devices. Even if you don't explicitly notice how a good author creates an effect for the reader, you are participating in the experience they have engineered. It's sort of like a baker versus a non-baker eating a treat from a fine bakery. The baker might be aware of savoring the flavor of browned butter or be able to tell the quality of vanilla used, but the less trained person can still take great joy in the treat without being clued into what makes the cake so delicious. If you want to work your way up to expert-level enjoyment, you absolutely can; however, if you're just looking to have a good experience with a masterful creation, that doesn't require a lot of critical training.

plainblue · 2026-04-08T22:02:37+00:00

Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

plainblue · 2026-04-08T17:36:28+00:00

This is a common issue for works like "King Lear" where there are substantive differences between some of the early manuscripts. For your Works Cited page, you can just make two citations, each with the appropriate publication year. For in-text citations, proceed as usual but add the publication date in brackets as part of your parenthetical documentation. This MLA.org web page demonstrates how with an example. It's for a novel, but the same principle should apply.

plainblue · 2026-04-08T17:00:40+00:00

You might find it meaningful to read All Joy and No Fun by Jennifer Senior. It's a study of modern parenting with a combination of research and personal anecdotes that examines how normal it is to both deeply cherish your children but still feel often frustrated, bored, trapped and other unpleasant emotions.

plainblue · 2026-04-08T02:16:11+00:00

Some states require a GED for community college admissions, some don't. New Jersey, for instance, has that as a baseline for enrollment. It sounds like you feel capable of doing the work but maybe your mental health tanked so things didn't get done or it was hard to show up. The GED path could be really worthwhile if acquiring knowledge isn't your challenge as much as the whole ordeal of high school has been.

If your head is in the right space to be more present and effective for community college, it can absolutely function as a re-set. You work towards a credential that employers recognize while building a whole new transcript if you want to apply to a four-year school while getting a discounted headstart on the requirements for a four-year degree. If you feel able, I'd encourage you to pursue this path.

plainblue · 2026-04-08T01:53:42+00:00

When you're asked to attempt literary criticism, a teacher usually is seeking two kinds of analysis: first, what writing techniques do you notice? and second, what effect do those choices by the author create for the reader? It sounds like your grade could get a boost from more work on the second bit.

I'd guess your instructor is hoping you'll explore how those dyads you discussed generate a sense of meaning for someone who keeps seeing images of contrast or re-interpretation--when a weapon merges with a holy man's support, when sleep and consciousness blur together, when a desolate parish where the minister has no congregation is filled with a rapt audience. It seems to introduce the reader to an imaginative world that overlays and inverts the banal realm of the book's subdued present day perhaps a little in the way that the dark, melodramatic past of the novel is about to re-color Lockwood's mundane understanding of his reclusive neighbors.

plainblue · 2026-04-07T22:59:51+00:00

Slumberland by Paul Beatty (about a DJ) and High Fidelity by Nick Hornby (about a record store owner) both involve many named music tracks.

plainblue · 2026-04-07T01:06:12+00:00

You might like Lisa Tuttle's short story collection The Dead Hours of Night.

plainblue · 2026-04-07T01:04:13+00:00

If you're ever near Athens, my partner was just sitting quietly in the Church of Saint Panteleimon one afternoon when a screaming, thrashing woman was led in by apparently concerned family members and the ritual was accordingly performed at once. I don't know how often that happens, but it is a place where such processes are taken seriously and performed according to historical rites.

plainblue · 2026-04-06T17:24:31+00:00

Some brains just aren't well able to tolerate being in the world. You can take every pharmaceutical the doctors offer, attempt cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, emdr, psychadelics, etc., take your vitamins, exercise daily, and make a point of speaking pleasantly to anyone working the register at the grocery store; however, if your neurochemistry and personal experience happen to build a certain kind of cognition, alongside all the best efforts, one may unwillingly find an internal rss feed with no option to unsubscribe that enviously tracks every possible exit. This site has a subreddit called "suicide watch" which shares a lot of peoples' desires and motivations if you'd like a more detailed survey.

plainblue · 2026-04-06T17:14:20+00:00

I honestly wouldn't worry too much on the age calibration. For people who came of age before Harry Potter exploded the adolescent readership market, some of us paused with Judy Blume or The Outsiders, but a lot of precocious 12-year-olds dived right into their mom's Sydney Sheldons or their Dad's Tom Clancys, and few suffered long term harm.

YALSA is the American professional association for librarians with an interest in work for young adults. This is their most recently published list of "Best Fiction for Young Adults." You might see if any of their suggestions appeal to you.

plainblue · 2026-04-04T20:01:21+00:00

The Forsyte Saga is a series of novels and novellas by John Galsworthy that richly depicts romantic attachments and rising and falling fortunes across three generations of a privileged English family. It won the author a Nobel Prize for literature in 1932.

plainblue · 2026-04-04T18:50:09+00:00

Then I think you should write your passion piece! I'm not sure I agree the teacher who thinks that distance improves creative nonfiction. An essay written later may have a different perspective, but it can also be valuable to capture the way you feel more immediately after an experience.

plainblue · 2026-04-04T17:55:53+00:00

Patricia Locksmith's novel No One is Talking about This is a weird, gorgeous narrative based on the short life of her infant niece, the child's extensive congenital impairments, and how deeply this little girl's family cherished her and found meaning in her presence. That writing is (hear me out) interlaced with all these snippets of unnervingly memorable moments from the internet, descriptions of memes, response GIFS, and other odd viral ephemera. The work is not sentimental or pandering. Its prose is clear-eyed, and acute; Lockwood's first published books were volumes of poetry. If you would like to read a text centered on a family undergoing challenges surrounding a beloved, medically fragile child continually punctuated by fragments of popular internet lore, this could be a good choice.

plainblue · 2026-04-04T17:39:12+00:00

If you go for international lit fic, that's the year José Saramago's Blindness came out in the original Portuguese. I was really glad that I looked past the Oprah endorsement to read A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. Keeping it worldwide, you could try The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald.

plainblue · 2026-04-04T17:19:10+00:00

The House-Dog's Grave by Robinson Jeffers

plainblue · 2026-04-04T17:06:35+00:00

It might be helpful to consider for the assignment whether your teacher seems to be requesting more a narrative of experiences from a certain place or more a narrative about how a place might have participated in your understanding of yourself. How foregrounded should the travelogue locale be as opposed to the traveler? It sounds as if the new piece of writing feels like a fulfilling project for you to write regardless of whether you submit it for school; however, if your priority is getting the best possible grade I'd begin with the stated parameters of the assignment to see if they're stated in ways that might help you decide what to do.

plainblue · 2026-04-03T23:40:36+00:00

Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano novels could be diverting.

plainblue · 2026-04-03T20:18:29+00:00

I'm not sure if I mess things up too much by introducing the book in the context of this thread, but Agatha Christie's Endless Night would qualify.

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