Dear Emily, In my honest opinion, I believe your rhetorical essay on “America Needs Its Nerds” by Leonid Fridman was fairly decent, overall. Although you had several strong sentence structures and comments, there are a few weaknesses to your essay which I will try to critique, constructively. The first paragraph in your essay had a strong introductory sentence. It also included the purpose of the paragraph, which was mentioned clearly and thoughtfully. However, you need a stronger assertion sentence in the first body paragraph. Also, there are a few instances where your sentence’s ideas were repeated a few times, so try to proofread your essay and merge the sentences together to come up with a better sentence, or simply exclude one of those sentences. You had great commentaries that show your understanding of the rhetorical strategies that you addressed. However, they’ve only explained “why” a strategy was used but not “how” it was used. The second and third paragraphs had strong assertions as well as implicit quotations from the passage. Although your essay does not include 5 paragraphs, I can conclude that you have good understanding about how to find and explain rhetorical strategies used in passages and texts. You had solid assertions, implicit and strong evidence, as well as fairly thorough commentaries. However, you need to work on maintaining the flow of your essay, reconsidering the optimal vocabulary that could be used in certain sentences, and proofreading your essay in case there are sentences that do not certainly provide complete explanation of the point you’re making.