This essay was written by Paul Roberts, who wrote several textbooks about the English language and its use, making him a person that can be trusted when it comes to writing pages of prose about largely uninteresting subjects. He explains techniques that the reader can use in their own essays to make them more captivating and interesting. His target audience is college students, who are still stuck in their old high school writing habits and clichés.
He uses an example of a typical essay - an opinion piece on college sports - and shows how a normal student would go about composing it. He uses the second person, which makes the reader feel as though the advice is addressed directly to them, and it helps them see more clearly the ways that they can apply it to their own writing. It also makes the author seem like a more familiar figure to the reader, so they're more likely to trust his advice and follow it. Roberts also focuses his essay around a central example to make his suggestions more concrete and to exemplify the way they can be used in an essay. Additionally, he uses humor and informal language to soften the criticisms that he throws at the reader.
This writer is obviously tired of students writing and rewriting the same kind of paper over and over again, with no originality whatsoever. His purpose was to rectify that, and to demonstrate several common mistakes that can be easily corrected to vastly improve the quality of writing. I believe he accomplished this purpose, because by the end of the essay, I was newly aware of the issues in my own writing, and informed of ways I could correct them. The essay was well organized with headings that pointed precisely to specific ways that creativity could be added to an otherwise boring paper. I would say that anyone who reads this is very likely to employ this essay's techniques in their own writing.
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