Hello! I am reviewing your essay on "Banning Smoking in Public". My review is based on my own opinion so take it as you like it. This review is offered only for the purpose of being constructive! I generally make my reviews public for the purpose of educating other writers.
I enjoyed reading your essay and as a non smoker agree with your thoughts, which I will amplify at the end of my review. ;)
TITLE: The title is straight to the point. It contains no "hook" to draw in readers, but it's controversial topic probably is. If you were to title the essay: "I'm Banning Smoking in Public", or "They're Banning Smoking in Public" that would make readers question the topic more and attract them.
TEXT BODY: Although it may be considered by some to be a little "old school", I still like to see paragraphs indented since it helps the reader keep track of their place in the article. I suggest about 5 spaces on the indent. Below is a demonstration of how I would indent a large block of your item:
"Wherever we go, we usually want a clean and comfortable environment. Even though Beijing is not one of the cleanest cities in China, people should still strive for a more comfortable, and less harmful, way of life. But when a cigarette is lit, it sends a cloud of smoke into the air around us, polluting the air with not only its smell, but also the chemicals within it. The smell is so strong that very few people are willing to stand close to a smoker.
Smoking in general does a lot of damage to the human body. It harms the lungs the most, but can also damage other organs, and makes the smoker’s teeth go bad and their breath smell awful. Why, with all this information about the dangers of smoking, do people continue to smoke? The answer is simple: smoking is an addiction. Once people get used to smoking, they cannot give it up easily; while there are those who have quit successfully, there are others who find it too hard to quit and just give up, despite the advice of others. They abandon themselves, losing all caring for their own well being.
It is not only smokers themselves who are affected by their habit, but also the people around them. The dangers of breathing in secondhand smoke are only slightly less than actually smoking a cigarette. When you breathe in the smoke from someone else’s cigarette, you have just as much risk of having the same health problems. Especially in public places, where the smoke has very few places to go, cigarette smoke is hard to avoid. Pregnant women are especially in danger when breathing in secondhand smoke; the smoke can get into not only their lungs, but also the lungs of their unborn children, which are not yet fully formed. This will lead to the child being born with a weakened body."
So I hope you can see the value of indenting each new paragraph. If I am interrupted while reading a story without indentations, it's more difficult to find the spot where I took pause.
GRAMMAR and PUNCTUATION: The second line could be shortened and make more sense if you changed the wording. Remember that time is valuable to most readers so anything that can be shortened, yet maintain the details is a worthy goal! You wrote:
"we should at least strive to ban smoking in public areas, such as subway platforms and in or around schools and hospitals."
I would write:
we should at least strive to ban smoking in public areas, such as subway platforms, schools and hospitals.
My version removes four syllables, yet maintains your thought.
This line, (near the center of the essay), "They abandon themselves, losing all caring for their own wellbeing.", needs to have the ending corrected to read "well-being" because (properly), the words should be joined by a hyphen.
In the third line you don't need an apostrophe in the word cigarettes. You wrote cigarette's.
FINAL THOUGHTS: I recently moved from the U.S. State of Oregon where it is illegal to smoke in any public place (indoors) and a smoker must be 10 feet from any public doorway while smoking. Oregon has several Universities that ban smoking all together on school property. YEA!
I moved 2,400 miles to OHIO, USA where the laws are the same, yet sadly are unenforced! In Oregon, I enjoyed singing Karaoke in a smoke free club. I have had to give that up in Ohio since the laws are not enforced and I have mild asthma. In Oregon about half the people smoke but in Ohio it's more like 2/3rds who smoke.
I believe it should be my right to breathe fresh air so I am not only against smoking tobacco products, but truck fumes as well! One thing that you could also remind people of is that smoking dulls a persons taste buds, making food less enjoyable.
Many people use smoking as an excuse to stay thin, yet I can't tell you how many grossly overweight people have told me that!
I appreciate your essay and the quality of the information that you conveyed in it! Well done! :)
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