Free Feedback on "The Age Of Curiosity”
Hi Edson,
Thank you for submitting your essay for feedback. I'm excited to offer this to friends of David Perell and Write of Passage. You can look forward to:
- Written feedback on structure and flow
- Notes on clarity and concision (at the sentence/paragraph level)
- "The One Thing" to focus on if you were to revise this piece
- And a video overview of my feedback.
My goal is not just to give you feedback that would improve this single essay but to give you feedback that, if you apply it to future projects, would make you a better writer (by helping you become a better self-editor).
I'm going to work through the drafts in the order they were submitted (you're third), and I'll have feedback to everyone within the next two weeks.
Your friend in prose,
Garrett Kincaid
The One Thing
Find your main idea and provide evidence for it.
Feedback
- This is an interesting idea that you could expand on and make more of a focus in this essay. Here’s how I interpret it: Adults consider kids’ questions stupid, but maybe it’s the adults who are stupid for accepting the world without questioning it. For adults, the way back to childlike wonder is by fostering one’s curiosity.
- You don’t go very deep on this idea, and I think you could rewrite the whole essay to focus on it. Provide evidence for these claims:
- Adults consider children’s questions stupid.
- It’s stupid/ignorant to not question the way things are.
- The way back to childhood wonder is by becoming more curious.
- Bring your reader along and convince them of your position. The way this draft reads is that you expect me to agree with you without you convincing me, with an argument.
- Be more intentional with paragraph breaks. Consider a paragraph the unit of an essay, and help your reader flow through your piece by grouping related ideas into paragraphs, each with their own single main idea. It’s hard to follow the flow of your essay when the paragraph breaks seem arbitrary and most of the paragraphs are short.
- This is very confusing. Why introduce Mark Zuss if you’re not going to quote from his work but instead simply from Wikipedia?
- It’s disorienting for you to reference the title of the essay you’re writing to explain why that’s the title. Instead, spend that space and time exploring your topic in more detail.
- The diversion into reading and Elon Musk at the end feels like a tangent. If you’d like to talk more about reading and how it relates to curiosity, introduce that idea earlier, and give it more time and space within the body of your argument.
On the surface all this sounds like stupid questions & many adults would try to avoid such questions. Could it be that the opposite is true? That its the adults who have become stupid to accept the world as is without questioning? Kids don't mind going down the rabbit hole until they get to the bottom of what seems a simple matter at the beginning.
A little defining will help to bring context. According Mark Zuss, Assistant Professor in the Graduate Reading Program at Lehman College, in the USA, who’s the author of “The Practice of Theoretical Curiosity” The term curiosity is heavily associated with all aspects of human development, in which derives the process of learning & desire to acquire knowledge & skill.I like the simplicity of the earlier definition cited by Wikipedia, it defines curiosity as a “motivated desire for information”