Sample Response

This is a response to a Distance Education Health Policy essay submitted in the fall of 2005.

Hi, Thanks for using the online tutor. My name is Bond, and I will be responding to your paper today. Your paper has a lot of zip. I can tell there’s a person behind the writing, so that’s always good. I agree that it’s difficult to compress complex ideas into a 250-word essay. The short length may account for some of my confusion as I read the paper. Still, there are probably some areas that you could shore up so that the reader follows your point more easily. I will take your essay paragraph by paragraph and just give you a movie of my mind as I was reading.

It seems that you have chosen to focus primarily on the Larkin article. I didn’t know this was going to be a response to an article until I hit the second paragraph. Can you lay out the direction and point of the paper more explicitly right from the beginning? What’s your argument? I was also a bit confused by your interpretation of McLuen’s statement. Where is there any emphasis on the recipient? Can you explain how you extrapolated from this phrase that the recipient is most important? Your Message>Messenger>Recipient equation threw me a bit too. It seems to indicate that the message is most important. The final sentence of the introduction might be to repetitive too. You don’t have a lot of space, so you may want to save it for expanding on why the recipient is important in your particular line of work. Also, what do you mean by “most important”? Do you mean that the messenger needs to value the recipient in some way? I could make an argument for the message itself being quite important--much more important than particular audiences. So why is the recipient so significant in your field? You say that the Larkin article is delightful. Can you be more specific? What exactly does it say the folly of message or messenger based communication is? What does the impressiveness of a message have to do with anything? Can you expand on the impersonality of the new technologies and why they are so insidious?

You said that this paper might seem a bit scattered. As a reader, I have to admit that the third paragraph came out of the blue. You give three good quotations/sayings but there’s no sense of how they relate to one another or relate to the Larkin article or to your job. The final paragraph is a nice application of your ideas about the importance of the recipient to your job. If you have any words to spare, I encourage you to devote them to beefing up this section. Can you expand on how the company specifically values the audience of its message? What are some examples from day-to-day operations? What are the pros and cons of this approach? It seems to me that not valuing the message sufficiently could create problems. Can you connect this application more specifically to the Larkin article (or other articles if you decide to refer to more than one article)? My last response is that the final sentence of your paper struck me as abrupt. What does senior visibility have to do with messages and recipients?

Good luck with the revision. I hope this helps. Please fill out an evaluation. Bond