Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self
At first I had trouble finding Alice Walker’s thesis in the essay “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self”. I read over the first paragraph but no thesis pertaining to the story. I read the first five paragraphs a few times and eventually came to the conclusion that the topic of her story is that she is a pretty girl with “great spirit.” She goes on to narrate by saying “It was great fun being cute. But then, one day, it ended”. This referred to a time when she was 8 years old and was shot in the eye by a bb gun held by her brother. He then said “If you tell, we will get a whipping. You don’t want that to happen, do you?” Ms. Walker often narrates this way, quoting persons from her past and then adding in her thoughts on them in third person. After this accident, she lost her sight and would not look up like she used to; she didn’t have the same peppy attitude she always had. At 14 her eye was fixed and her spirit returned. She began to see the world as she once did and her life seemed to pick up where it left off at the accident. By her late 20’s and into her 30’s after she had a daughter, she came to see the defect in her eye in a new light, she embraced and loved it. In my opinion, this reinforces the topic of her story as her being a woman with “great spirit.”

The Great Imagination Heist
If I were to grade Reynolds Price’s essay based on the “Rubric for English 101 Essays” outline he’d get a D-. Three sentences make up his first paragraph, the first of which is very ambiguous and can’t be a thesis. The second saying “Most high-school graduates have spent more time watching television than they’ve spent in school” could be a thesis for a paper, although too broad, but his paper mainly speaks of imagination. This leaves us with his third sentence as a thesis, but only the end of the sentence “-the death of personal