Dear Student,
I’ve enjoyed reading this essay. I was immediately drawn in by the strong thesis statement in your
opening paragraph, where you directly tie in the article’s rhetorical strategies to its desired effects on
changing contemporary physician behavior and, consequently, the current doctor-patient relationship.
I think your emphasis on diction and etymology is right on. I was also quite convinced by your
concluding paragraph, where you question the ultimate effectiveness of Thomas’s central claim by
arguing that patients may not all desire a personal relationship with their doctors, in any case, and
mainly just want to get well – so it seems you’re saying doctors’ and patients’ perspectives may be
more aligned than Thomas is willing to accept.
That said, I did notice some areas to work on as you move into the next essay assignment. These
primarily relate (1) to your use of evidence from the text and (2) your analysis of that evidence (see my
comments in the margins). One of the prompts for this essay is that you write for a broad audience that
“includes people who have not read the text.” There were several moments in your essay where, as
this “general” reader, I needed both more context for your examples, and also more direct quotation
from the text itself in order fully to understand what Thomas says, and your analysis of it.
Additionally, as you work your way through your analysis, the “payoff” to your various points began
to feel a bit repetitive to me: rather than the new twist I expected the analysis to take, I encountered a
restatement in a different way of the idea that “the medical profession has taken a negative turn” (as
you phrase it in your conclusion). As you revise, I encourage you to think about how you might push
this analysis further – beyond the broad sweep of Thomas’s argument tracing the shift from “positive”
to “negative,” are there more subtle or more micro kinds of points that he makes? I think getting at
these will make your essay’s overall argument stronger and more convincing.
Finally, while in general I found it pretty easy to follow the logic of your argument, since you tend to
have clear topic sentences signaling the focus of individual paragraphs, I found myself having to reread
the paragraph that begins at the bottom of p.2 to figure out exactly what was going on, because the
important shift on p. 3 to your counterargument is not clearly signaled. I felt that the lack of signaling
here limited the amount of time you spent on these very strong points, and consequently their impact
on the overall argument. I wanted to hear more about how you were not convinced by Thomas, and
missing that piece made your point less convincing to me – something to think about for the future.
Overall I found this to be a nice start — please do let me know if you have any questions about my
comments.
AB
Persuading the Medical Community
In the ever changing world of medicine, the relationship between the doctor and the patient is
often times overlooked. In “Leech, Leech, Et Cetera”, Lewis Thomas describes how patient care has
developed over the years. By referencing how meanings of medical words have changed, Thomas