This is an A

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Here's the introduction and a selection from an A paper. The student is responding to David Abram's essay on shamanism, Peter Drucker's discussion of the rise of the knowledge society, and Petrosky's analysis of the role of failure in the design process.

The Balance of the Western Society

Magic is something that Western society does not place much emphasis or importance on. In tribal cultures, such as those visited by David Abram, shamans control magic and keep a balance between the tribal society and nature. The balance that exists is vital to the functioning of their society. David Abram discusses the idea of magic in his work, "The Ecology Of Magic". Abram speaks of the purpose of shamans and their power to keep the balance within the tribal society. Peter Drucker in his work, "The Age of Social Transformation", discusses the rise of the knowledge society and the function of the knowledge workers. Drucker also addresses the need for a balance within this society. Henry Petroski discusses the idea of failure and how almost everything is subject to failure in his work, To Engineer is Human. The imbalance that Abram views in the Western society is due to the uprise of knowledge workers and their susceptibility to various failures. Thus, the Western society is in need for a sector, such as the social sector, to provide a balance much like the shamans provide for the tribal culture.

If our society rejects ideas proposed by tribal cultures, one could ask how will society find its balance? Abram sees the imbalance of the Western society as a problem. Abram says, "Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human - made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities"(Abram 15). The one hope that our society has to maintaining a balance within society lies in the social sector. Drucker speaks of the idea of the balance within society coming from the social sector. Drucker says,

The new pluralism has a new problem: how to maintain the performance capacity of the new institutions and yet maintain the cohesion of society. This makes doubly important the emergence of a strong and functioning social sector. It is an additional reason why the social sector will increasingly be crucial to the performance, if not to the cohesion, of the knowledge society (Drucker 269)

Our society is "caught up in a mass of abstractions" but the social sector will provide "cohesion" to the broken apart and dysfunctions of society. The social sector may not use magic tactics as the shamans do, but for the functioning of our failing society, the social sector will help keep a balance.

Here's how we read this paper:

• The introduction: While the prose is stilted in this opening paragraph, the writer establishes that she is in control of a conceptually demanding project: she aims to show that Drucker's social sector must act as the shaman does in Abram's essay for contemporary society to achieve "balance." This is a big claim, but it is the kind of big gesture that immediately separates this paper from work at the lower levels.
  

• The body: In this paragraph, which comes just before the conclusion of the paper, the student writer begins to consider the the consequences of the West's likely continued rejection of the "ideas proposed by tribal cultures." Structurally and conceptually, this is a striking move, for it comes after the student writer has spent three pages presenting the virtues and the appeals of tribal culture. Where papers at the lower levels are content to provide an appealing alternative, this paper, as is characteristic of work at this level, includes a moment where the student writer reflects on the possible consequences of the alternate position that has been staked out. Here, the student writer acknowledges that it is quite unlikely that the West will re-embrace shamanism and then makes the remarkable and surprising argument that the role of the shaman must now be filled by the social sector.
  

• Other observations: This paper is also distinctive because it documents the student writer's persistent efforts to make connections by thinking about differences rather than similarities. So, for example, after discussing Abram early on in the paper, the student then moves to consider the relationship between the world that knowledge workers have created and the sensuous world that Abram describes. Thus, the connections is not between like ideas, but is made by way of establishing a causal relationship: "It is the rise of the knowledge society and the increase in knowledge workers that are responsible for the desensitization of humans to nature, which has the effect of an unbalanced society."

• It is also important to acknowledge that the prose remains awkward throughout the paper. While the infelicities in phrasing are many in number, they do not prevent one from understanding the author's intentions.
  

Applying the grading criteria:

In order to better understand the following final assessment of this paper, please refer to the section of the grading criteria that discusses A papers.

Despite the awkward phrasings, this paper qualifies as an A because:

• it generates "new questions and answers out of the source texts and its own earlier
  positions throughout the paper," using the assigned materials to advance and challenge the student writer's own evolving position.
  

• "the connective thinking is student-centered" and "because of the sustained development and effective articulation of a position that is related to ideas in the readings while not reducible to relationships readily identifiable in the readings."

It is always the case that one could ask for the student writer to be more explicit and to follow out the ideas even further. And, in this case, we would have liked to see the student say more about what duties and responsibilities the social sector is meant to take on in order to fill the role the student has defined for it. That said, we see this paper as exemplifying the kind of thinking and writing we hope to come out of The New Humanities Reader: the student has demonstrated her command of the assigned readings by using them to formulate her own position on the issues raised by the readings and, in so doing, given herself the opportunity to gauge the quality of her own thoughts about how society might be shaped in the 21st century.

So, an A, then, has a strong command of connection in its ability to move in and between the various essays. But what's more it has a confident sense of project. The student's voice is at moments as strong as any of the essayists.

Now that you have some sense of what makes each grade, it's your turn to try and apply what you've seen in these papers to a "mystery" paper. It's your turn to grade.

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