in the uploads I've attached the article No Margin for Error, the general grading rubric the teacher uses and the prompt sheet.
No Margin for Error
Despite its modest height, Mount Washington is America's deadliest peak. And yet the killing cold and hurricane gusts that scour its summit are far from New Hampshire state secrets. So why do otherwise smart, capable people keep losing their lives up there?
National Geographic Adventure. 6.9 (Nov. 2004): p52+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 National Geographic Society
When Monroe Couper and Erik Lattey left Harvard Cabin on the morning of February 26, 1994, the weather was relatively mild for winter on Mount Washington. The temperature was in the teens and the wind gusts ranged from 40 to 60 miles an hour on the summit. The forecast called for the conditions to hold until nightfall, and since Couper and Lattey didn't plan to go to the summit, they weren't that concerned about it. They intended to hire up Huntington Ravine and climb a wall of frozen groundwater known as Pinnacle Gully. They planned to be back by dark. Traveling light, they left their packs at the cabin.
It's not known for certain, but it's likely that the two ice climbers from South Orange and Riverdale, New Jersey, had read the recent article in Climbing Magazine about an ascent of Pinnacle Gully, a challenging intermediate climb. The exciting story of two teenagers who nearly died on a shield of rotten ice before rescuing themselves had attracted a lot of climbers to the route, but search-and-rescue (SAR) volunteers worried that it might encourage people to push beyond their abilities.
As Couper and Lattey were hiking up the broad and rugged trail, Main Comeau, a local guide and team leader for the Mountain Rescue Service (MRS) in New Hampshire, was leading a group up another trail. When he saw fast-moving clouds on the horizon, he turned his group around. Bill Aughton, another member of the MRS, was also out guiding that day. He was so impressed with the clouds that he photographed them before directing his group back toward shelter.
Comeau had guided Couper and taught him ice climbing. "Couper wanted to learn to lead," Comeau recalls. "He wanted to move off on his own. A lot of people aspire to a climb like that. But Pinnacle was not the right next step. It's a serious climb in a serious environment. Technically he could have done it--maybe, on a good day in perfect conditions. But on a scale of one to five, Pinnacle's a three-plus."
As Couper and Lattey reached the base of the gully, they realized that in their rush they'd forgotten their climbing rope back at Harvard Cabin. It was noon by the time they'd picked up the rope and left the cabin again. Despite their limited experience, they might have easily calculated at this point that they no longer had enough time to make the climb and descend before sunset. (It takes one hour just to get from the cabin to the base of the climb.) They almost certainly could have seen that the weather had started to worsen. And even if they weren't convinced to turn back, they could have read the big yellow signs posted at trailheads. "Stop," they say. Then in smaller letters: "The area ahead has the worst weather in America." Not some of the worst, the worst. The notice continues unequivocally: "Many have died there from exposure, even in the summer. Turn back now if the weather is bad."
Couper and Lattey pressed on.
The mythology is that anyone can get up Mount Washington, if not to ski its steep ravines, then at least to stand on top and look around. At 6,288 feet, it may not be high by Rocky Mountain standards, but it ranks as the highest peak in the Presidential Range, and each year scores hike the 4,000 vertical feet from the trailhead up to the top. (Others drive: An auto road snakes up the northern shoulder of the mountain and is open from May to October.)
But a gorgeous day on Mount Washington can turn bitter so fast that most people can't imagine it. They've never seen or felt anything like it, so they don't come armed with the true belief that one gets from direct experience. Like falling into icy water, the sudden cold shocks and numbs and defeats people before they have a chance to think clearly. The first person to climb Washington in winter conditions, in 1849, was also the first person to die there. Since then, 133 more people have lost their lives on the mountain, 24 of them in the past decade.
Not long ago, I hiked up the Tuckerman Ravine Trail on the first beautiful warm day of spring to see some of the haft million pilgrims who visit there each year. As I slogged up the steep, slippery slush in a dense forest of birch and pine richly floored with blowdown and ice storm damage, I was never out of sight of at least a dozen people. I saw octogenarians in long johns and six-year-olds in high-tech, expedition-weight summit gear. There were snowshoes and no shoes and serious looking people with ice climbing gear. Everyone was grinning, joking, saying hi to strangers in a giddy spring rite of passage. It was hard to tell how much we were risking just to be there.
After studying accidents for more than 30 years, I had come to Tuckerman Ravine with a question in mind: How do smart, capable, even well-prepared people--people like Couper and Lattey--make seemingly stupid mistakes and end up in serious trouble? There are many such happy places with their dark secrets from the beaches of southern Lake Michigan to the waterfalls along the Potomac River to the Grand Canyon (see "Danger Zones," page 58)--and they all have two things in common: People, even experienced people, underestimate the hazards and overestimate their ability to cope with them. But Mount Washington is perhaps the ultimate example of a deceptively hazardous destination.
Situated within a day's drive of 70 million people (a quarter of the nation's population), Mount Washington is what modern-day search-and-rescue volunteers call "instant wilderness." We come from the relatively safe environments of the city, where our mistakes are mostly forgiven, and we bring with us the careless ways we've learned there. Worse still, we travel to these danger zones and have a benign experience of them--like mine on Mount Washington on that beautiful sunny day. And that gives us a false sense of security.
"Climbers from out West like to say that they have to dig to get to 6,000 feet," Rick Wilcox says. Co-founder and president of the MRS, Wilcox is also owner of International Mountain Equipment, a gear and apparel shop that lies in the shadow of Mount Washington, in North Conway, New Hampshire. IME can outfit you for a day hike or for a climb of Everest. (Wilcox himself summited Everest on May 15, 1991.) Since 1972, he's been on more than 300 rescues on Mount Washington. His friend Rick Estes, a former lieutenant with the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, says: "People come here and say, 'I've climbed K2. I've climbed Annapurna. How bad can Washington be?'"
It can be bad. Because three major storm tracks converge here, the summit is hammered by an almost perpetual perfect storm. The jet stream runs across the top, while the cold Labrador Current and the warm Gulf Stream meet just off the coast. The jet stream steers the storms over the summit, and right behind them come the prevailing northwest wind and falling temperatures. That dynamic fills Tuckerman Ravine with upwards of 100 feet of snow by spring and makes for fantastic skiing. It also makes for lethal avalanches. A local weather observer once called Mount Washington "the exhaust pipe" of the continent.
The average wind speed on the mountain is 42.2 miles an hour in winter and 28.5 miles an hour in summer; but averages can be misleading. A typical wind speed in the lowlands is four to eight miles an hour. Hurricane-force winds slam the summit two out of three days from November to April and three out of four days in January, the windiest month.
Wind itself is a deceptive--and exponential--force. "Hurricane force" is defined as 73 miles an hour. But a wind of 100 miles an hour exerts twice as much force. Nicholas Howe, an authority on accidents in the Presidential Range, wrote in his book Not Without Peril about one night when the pen went off the recording chart at 162 miles an hour: "Facing the wind made it difficult to exhale, back to the wind made it difficult to get a breath in. Strictly speaking, it was physics, but it felt like drowning in an ocean of air." Unlike conditions in the lower elevations, where the coldest days are the calmest, Mount Washington's lowest temperatures and highest winds occur at the same time.
Snow presents yet another hazard. It can snow from 10 to 30 inches in May alone. The average is 250 inches a year on the summit, but that doesn't mean much. Most of the snow that people encounter is blown there by the wind. Nothing stays on top for long, and at times you can see the snow boiling off the summit from miles away. "An inch on the summit equals a foot in the ravines," Wilcox says. "There is no other mountain that has the same loading on the eastern slopes:"
And yet, if Mount Washington is more extreme than other danger zones, it's not entirely exceptional, either. Obviously, most people do not die or become seriously injured when visiting Mount Washington or other popular destinations where there are obvious hazards. That's because there is a difference between hazard and danger. Danger comes when you suspend your awareness of the hazard. The explanation for that lack of awareness begins with a misguided attitude and ends with an inflexible plan.
Wet and tired before they began their ascent in earnest, Couper and Lattey struggled from the start. Other climbers even watched the two slowly make their way up the first pitch of about 150 feet on Pinnacle Gully.
"They should have taken a couple of hours on that at most," Wilcox reflected as we sat talking in his store one afternoon. "But it took them close to four hours." Their slow progress should have made it obvious that it was time to quit. "A simple rappel down to the bottom--two ice screws worth maybe 50 bucks each. What's your life worth?" said Wilcox. "They could have come back another day."
But by then hypothermia would have had a chance to set in as each man would have to take a turn standing still in the cold to belay the other in sweaty clothing.
"If you look at the etiology of a lot of these accidents, you find that they are due to dehydration," said Maury McKinney, Wilcox's partner at the International Mountain Climbing School, which is adjacent to IME and shares offices with the store. Dehydration sets in motion the physical and mental collapse that will eventually result in death from exposure. In short, dehydration exacerbates hypothermia. Add exhaustion, and the downward spiral is rapid.
At the top of the first pitch, Couper and Lattey faced another 600 to 700 feet of climbing on similar ice before they could exit the route and hike down an unmarked trail. The normal turnaround time is 3 p.m., at the latest, but Couper and Lattey were seen there, hanging on the wall, and not making good progress, at 5 p.m.
"The last climbers to pass them were at around 3:30-ish," Wilcox said, "and they were still a good distance from the top of the gully, maybe halfway up with 400 feet to go. Daylight ends at 4:30 or 5 here at that time of year. Couper and Lattey had asked the group that passed them if they'd wait at the top and show them the way down, a walk-off route." But as it grew dark, the group couldn't wait any longer.
When they reached the top, Couper and Lattey found themselves on an exposed slab, in darkness, with temperatures that were rapidly dropping toward minus 25[degrees]F and winds rising to gusts of 108 miles an hour. Alain Comeau told me, There's no real way down once you get to the top. You're really exposed for a mile of horrendous travel across the Alpine Garden"--a sloped meadow above treeline but beneath the
summit. About the same time that the pair might have made this realization, the caretaker at Harvard Cabin noticed two abandoned packs. Searchers around town on this Saturday night began to hear their beepers go off.
In any hazardous situation, there are three zones: the Safe Zone, the Danger Zone, and the Dead Zone. By leaving the cabin and hiking up Huntington Ravine, Couper and Lattey had passed from the Safe Zone into the Danger Zone out on the ice. Because of hypothermia, dehydration, and exhaustion, they were unable to process new information. "Their judgment was failing as they got deeper and deeper into trouble," Wilcox suggests. They had one way out--to rappel down--and they could no longer think clearly enough to take it.
That is the heart of the mystery of why rational people do irrational things: The climbers were no longer making decisions. Couper and Lattey's mistakes were behind them, stretching back for months. Their fate was purely physical now. Their bodies were simply going up without the aid of reason, following an outdated plan toward an imagined idea of rest and safety. Wilcox and McKinney see it almost every, year.
"It's the repeats that get to you," Wilcox told me. "But what am I going to do? I sell this stuff to them."
One repeating accident at Mount Washington occurs on Lion Head Trail, Wilcox said. It's the standard hiking route to the summit. It's nontechnical but snowy, and crampons are a good idea. Up to 150 people climb it every weekend in winter, and at least one person a month breaks a leg. The record for a single year is 15 broken legs.
Lion Head Trail follows a high ridge from east to west on the north headwall of Tuckerman Ravine. Going up it is straightforward but strenuous and rocky. Going down is slick and tricky. It can also be exhausting. Just before the trail begins to drop off the ridge back to Tuckerman Ravine Trail, it borders a long, wide, creamy-looking chute of snow that appears to be not too steep. At that point, well below the summit, you'd have to be a cardiovascular giant not to be tired. You're probably at least a little dehydrated, too. Your body desperately wants to stop walking downhill. And your body almost always gets what it wants. That's why people see this spot and think: I've got a great idea, I'll just slide down. Glissading is a conventional mountaineering technique, but, like self-arrest, it takes training and a keen eye for conditions. It also requires removing your crampons.
In seconds, you can get going to 30 miles: an hour or so, a frightening speed when you're on your butt on a high ridge. With clear thinking completely out of the picture now (fear having added a new stress to confound good judgment), reflexes will take over, and you'll put your feet down to stop yourself. With or without crampons, your own momentum will likely flip you, and then you'll go cartwheeling a very long way If you're lucky, the fall will just cleanly snap one or more of your leg bones. In the pack room in the basement of the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) visitors center at Pinkham Notch, a traditional meeting place, I had noticed numerous young people walking around with leg braces on. Now I knew why. "After a rain," Wilcox said, "we've been known to get fatalities on that route."
McKinney had poked his head into the office and was listening. "Yeah," he put in, "if you want free gear, go up to the bottom of Lion Head Trail Monday morning. Lion Head is definitely the scene of the most accidents."
"What we need is education, respect, and common sense," Wilcox said, pointing out the window to Cathedral Ledge, which has several great rock climbs. He said he could predict the accidents there like clockwork. In fact, some of them are the work of clocks.
"When they change the clocks in October, it starts getting dark at five," he said. And every year several people do the same thing: They start climbing with their heads in the old time zone, get benighted on top, and decide they can tough it out, because when they began, it was 65 or 70 degrees. They make it to nine or ten o'clock, when it gets down to about 30 degrees, and start yelling for help that's how close to civilization they are. (The base is a 100-yard walk from a hotel parking lot.) "It's only 300 feet, two rappels. But we have to go up and get them." He threw his hands up in the air and shouted, "Can't you see the sun going down?"
(The top of Cathedral Ledge is in the city of Bartlett, but the bottom is in Conway. Once, when someone fell off and died, the police got into an argument over who had to clean up the mess. One of them finally shouted in frustration, "Well, he was fine when he left Bartlett!")
Climbers do notice the dark coming on, of course. But it is difficult to believe how quickly and efficiently stress can short-circuit rational thought and allow your body to take over and simply keep you moving in the wrong direction. Like Couper and Lattey, a climber may know in an intellectual sense the right thing to do. But reason has become a small, far-off voice, while his body tells him that if only he finishes the climb, he'll be just fine. Wilcox says that Couper and Lattey, "had this incredible failure to change their plans, this do-or-die attitude, even after spending four or five hours on the first pitch--and that's after the debacle of leaving the rope behind."
But our fate is fashioned out of more than simple mistakes. However ill-advised our actions may seem to others after the fact, no one sets out to be stupid. In fact, most everything we do makes sense to us at the time in terms of the sum total of what we have learned. And that--our most powerful learning--takes place in the body, beyond the reach of consciousness. Couper and Lattey's biggest mistake was never having experienced the worst weather on Mount Washington. By the time they did, it was too late to learn.
What happened to Couper and Lattey when they reached the Alpine Garden is more than conjecture. Long years of research and experience have shown that people follow a pattern of behavior shaped by physiology, psychology, terrain, and natural forces.
"People won't walk into the wind when they're lost in a whiteout," Wilcox said. "They arrive on top after dark. Now they're faced with no visibility, wind over 100 miles an hour right in their faces from the direction they should be going, and they decide to hunker down below the lip where it's sheltered."
We can safely speculate that Couper and Lattey thought of the tents and sleeping bags and clothing they could have brought with them. "Rule number one, especially on Huntington," he said, "is that you should always be prepared to spend the night out."
By dawn Sunday morning there were 33 high-angle rescue workers, including Comeau and Wilcox, at the base of Huntington Ravine. As they began working their way up, the wind reached 127 miles an hour. Soon everyone was back down in the trees. They couldn't search safely in those conditions, which have been known to freeze eyeballs.
"That happened on Saturday," Comeau recalled, "and it wasn't until Tuesday that we got to them. The wind stays for days here. People always think that if something happens, someone will come along. But we don't always come along."
Monday morning the wind reached 128 miles an hour with temperatures down to minus 15[degrees]F. Searchers had to crawl on their bellies to keep from being blown off, which would have meant falling 2,000 feet. Wilcox surmised that Couper and Lattey had hunkered down as early as five o'clock, in the hopes of waiting out the wind. Lattey decided to go for help, was turned back by weather and terrain, and was crawling back up when he died.
It was Comeau who found Couper. He was frozen, leaning up against a cairn with his hands reaching into his pack, as if trying to get his stove to make something hot to drink. With all the wind, it took Comeau some time to realize that Lattey lay close by. His face was in the rocks, his arms reaching up toward Couper. "They were 10 feet apart," Wilcox remembered. They were also only a quarter mile from an auto road and a way down. They had no map or compass.
Most of our actions most decisions about what to do next, take place without conscious thought. Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University who is famous for his research into how the emotional systems in the brain work to generate behavior, has concluded that for the most part, we do things and then make up stories to explain what we've done so that it seems consistent with our view of who we are and what our lives are like. That sounds ridiculous if we think of ourselves as primarily rational creatures. But brain research dating back to the early 1970s is leading inexorably to that conclusion. So-called implicit learning or emotional learning is more powerful than conscious, intellectual learning because it is what drives behavior.
"In modern life," LeDoux wrote in his 2002 book, Synaptic Self, "we sometimes suffer from the exquisite operation of this system, since it is difficult to get rid of this kind of conditioning once it is no longer applicable to our lives." That is why having a lovely experience in a place that can turn deadly can set a trap for us by shaping the way we unconsciously make decisions. In other words, we have developed an adaptation to one environment, and we fail to take into account that some environments--especially in the wilderness--are subject to huge and sudden changes.
The implications of LeDoux's research are far-reaching, especially when we are operating in hazardous environments. This, along with a lot of other brain research from the past 30 years, suggests that conscious, rational thought is not the giant we make it out to be. It is, instead, a ghostly companion to our behavior, only vaguely and imperfectly guiding it. Under stress or in high emotional states, it becomes a faint whisper that is easy to ignore, which helps explain why, for example, people who become lost rarely backtrack, or why a snowboarder, seeing a great line, may not stop to consider avalanche potential.
Certainly, the mind's ability to plan ahead is a useful and efficient tool. But that very utility is a trap, too. We have to be able to continuously review the plan in light of new developments. We have to remain flexible.
Wilcox lives in the shadow of Mount Washington. Any day that the weather is nice, he can get up there in a short time, hiking or ice climbing, and "be home for beer call," as he put it. Thinking about Couper and Lattey and numerous others whose bodies he's retrieved, he added, "They'd been planning this for months. To them, it was the big trip, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Like Everest was for me."
Stress acted to make the plan unshakable by blocking out new perceptions and reason. For example, instead of interpreting "iffy weather" as meaning it might be bad, you'll interpret it as "it'll probably be OK." Making matters worse, Couper and Lattey underestimated the severity of the weather they faced. The way they were equipped (no down parkas, mittens, or tent) testifies to the fact that they had not experienced such extremes. In other words, with reason out of the picture, they fell back on what their bodies had learned. And they happened to do so in an environment where everything they'd learned was wrong.
Before I left Mount Washington, I sat in the lobby of the run-down Eastern Slope Inn in North Conway with Rick Estes. A powerfully built man with the brush-cut moustache of a previous generation of outdoorsmen, Estes coordinated search and rescues on Mount Washington for three decades. It's no surprise then that he has the philosophical demeanor of someone who's seen way too many people hurt themselves in the same ways for way too long. You might call his attitude disgusted sympathy.
Despite all the efforts, from public relations to legal remedies, the number of rescues, substantial injuries, and deaths in the Presidential Range continues to mount. Three have died in just the first three months of this year. "2001 was the worst," Estes said, referring to all the emergencies. "We were running out of funds. Thanksgiving Day we ran out of volunteers. There were just horrendous cases."
Estes recalled for me a guy and his girlfriend who ran into trouble on the Arethusa Falls Trail. The trail leads up from Crawford Notch State Park to the crest of the 200-foot falls (the tallest in New Hampshire). The woman got tired and decided to go back down, while the guy continued up, taking the camcorder so that he could show her what she'd missed. "He beat her down," Estes said laconically. "We picked up his brain in a bread bag, which was all we had with us." Estes watched the tape from the shattered video camera. It showed the man's feet on the green, wet slime that covered the rock from which he'd slipped. The very rock that signs advise you to avoid. Then: nothing.
The forest is littered with such grisly stories, and most of them lead us back to simple principles. Estes and most others I talked to believe that, as a nation, we have made ourselves less self-reliant by developing a dependence on what he calls "magic wands," such as GPS devices and cell phones. But everything in our culture, from warning labels on McDonald's coffee cups to personal-injury lawsuits, encourages us to give responsibility to someone else. George Orwell called it "protective stupidity."
"You usually find people with brand-new packs and a stove that's never been started," Estes said. "They call and say something like, 'I'm lost, but I can hear the cars.' What do you say to someone like that?"
When we engage Mother Nature for fun, on the beaches or in the canyons, on the mountains or in the forests, we come away with what we call "experience," but we often forget to credit some of our success to dumb luck. We fail to appreciate that the next time could be very, very different. We lean too heavily on our faith in reason, forgetting the power that this hidden gap in our learning may have over our decisions. So in the thrill of the moment, in a place that doesn't suffer ignorance or inattention, we drop our guard.
The most recent brain research into how we learn and how we make decisions builds on LeDoux's implicit-learning theories. Laboratory researchers such as Antonio Damasio, author of the breakthrough 1994 book Descartes" Error and the head of the neurology department at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, have concluded that we learn just as much with our body as with what we call our mind that in fact, some essential learning cannot take place without the participation of the body. Clues to this have been around for a long time, but it's only in the past decade or so that scientists have begun to describe how the mind--and body--learn, and how both later make decisions based on that learning.
That's why Main Comeau and Bill Aughton both turned back from Mount Washington when they saw the weather, and Couper and Lattey did not. Comeau and Aughton had had the physical learning required to make that decision: They had experienced the worst weather there. They had felt it. Couper and Lattey kept going because they did not have that learning. If you have not experienced the worst a favorite destination can dish out, you are missing a crucial piece of knowledge. Even if someone tells you about it, you can't truly know until you feel it.
The implications of this when we're in hazardous environments is: If our bodies haven't learned from direct experience, we don't really know. It may seem like we know, but that's an illusion worse than ignorance. And so the rule is: Know what you don't know. And the only substitute is a guide who has the knowledge and implicit learning you lack. In the larger system that puts millions of people in these danger zones each year, there may be no way to stop the accidents from happening. But simply by recognizing our own fallibility, we can keep them from happening to us.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gonzales, Laurence. "No Margin for Error: Despite its Modest Height, Mount Washington is America's Deadliest Peak.” National Geographic Adventure, Nov. 2004, p. 52+. General Reference Center GOLD, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A129892380/GRGM?u=lom_oakcc&sid=GRGM&xid=69bc580e. Accessed 28 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A129892380
First Writing Prompt
ENG 1060 Fall 2020
Laurence Gonzales’s article, “No Margin for Error,” discusses the lure and danger of climbing Mt. Washington. In the article Gonzales states, “Despite all the efforts, from public relations to legal remedies, the number of rescues, substantial injuries, and deaths in the Presidential Range continues to mount.”
In a well-developed essay, citing specific points from the article, discuss what about Erik Lattey and Monroe Couper (and other doomed hikers) caused them to be so unsuccessful.
Stated another way: In “No Margin for Error” author Laurence Gonzales points out that the staff at the Presidential Range have done everything they can (“from public relations to legal remedies”) to get people to stop getting hurt on the mountain, but they keep getting themselves hurt. Why is that?
Please do not simply summarize the text. As always, you must:
Choose a single point. Do not summarize everything that went wrong. You need a thesis to hold the paper together, then the various problems will be used to support that point. Don’t list all the problems; look at what caused the problems. Show how each problem you choose to discuss relates to your thesis. (You don’t need to cover every possible item).
Go through the article thinking about WHY these guys had problems. Choose one reason (there are many possible reasons).
Prove that point with specific examples from the text. (Don’t just say they did not have warm enough gear; quote the part about how they probably wished they had brought parkas and tents.)
Introduce your evidence—make it clear when it’s you and when it’s your source talking.
Arrange your evidence into single point paragraphs.
Check each paragraph to see if it supports your thesis. Make sure each paragraph has a topic sentence and sticks to that one topic. Introduce evidence with signal phrases. Do not use the author’s first name. “No Margin for Error” CANNOT be your essay’s title. If you do not spellcheck or capitalize appropriately, you may not say “I did my best”.
Refer to ‘What I Require in All Essays’.
Step one—read this page a couple times
Step two—brainstorm: list all the things that went wrong
Step three—then chunk them into categories (or highlight with different colors). Consider what is caused by lack of experience, what is caused by arrogance, what is caused by failing to consider time, etc. What will your thesis be and what examples will you use to prove it? Write it down in outline form and submit it to the dropbox.
Step four—write. Using your outline and ‘What I Require in All Essays’, create a draft. Have in introduction that talks about the overall cause of the hikers’ downfall (so specifics). Then each body paragraph should roughly follow the format laid out in the ‘What I Require’ document. Have a topic sentence, introduce evidence, present evidence (cite), analyze/explain evidence , and wrap to your thesis (the overall cause of the downfall). .
Step five—revise. Take a break, read it over, then improve your essay.
Step six—edit. Use what you already know and what are learning about grammar and punctuation to improve your essay.
Step seven—proofread. Very carefully make sure you have not skipped words, repeated yourself, be sure everything make sense, etc.
Submit your draft to the dropbox.
General Grading Rubric
| Criteria | Exceeds Expectations “A” paper |
Meets Expectations “B” paper |
Needs Improvements “C” paper |
Inadequate "D/F" Paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FOCUS | Clearly identifies the main idea or point of viewAlways stays focused on a single topic within the essay and within paragraphs | Identifies the main idea or point of viewAlmost always stays focused on the single topic within the essay and within paragraphs | Struggles with the main idea or point of viewNot always on topic within the essay and/or within paragraphs | Does not identify the main idea or point of viewDoes not stay focused on a topic within the essay and/or within paragraphs |
| CONTENT | Grasps the reader’s attentionStrong evidence of thorough and thoughtful thinking about the topicMain idea is clearly and correctly supported with relevant details and examplesIs clearly written | May grasp the reader’s attentionShows some evidence of thorough and thoughtful thinking about the topicSupporting details and examples are relevant to the topicIs relatively clear | May not grasp the reader’s attentionContains little evidence of thorough and thoughtful thinking about the topicSupporting details and examples may not be relevant to the topicIs unclear | Does not draw the reader into the essayDoes not contain evidence of thorough or thoughtful thinking about the topicLacks details and examplesConfusing |
| ORGANIZATION | Organized appropriately for audience and purposeParagraphs are logically orderedStrong transition words or phrases skillfully connect ideas and paragraphsIntroduction connects readers to the essay’s purposeConclusion is effective | Organized appropriately for audience and purposeParagraphs are developed but may not be in the right order or contain enough supportTransition words or phrases connect ideas and paragraphsIntroduction connects with the essay’s purposeHas a conclusion | Organization is somewhat easy to followParagraphs can be under-developed, not always in the right order, and in need of additional supportTransition words or phrases rarely connect ideas and paragraphsIntroduction and/or conclusion may be unclear | Organization is not easy to followParagraphs are unrelated or poorly written with little or no supportLacks transition words or phrases that connect ideas and paragraphsIntroduction and/or conclusion is weak or missing |
| STYLE | Effective sentence structure choices to match audience and purposeCreative and thoughtful word choice to support tone and purposeTone effectively matches audience and purposeClear sentences that flow smoothly and make sense | Sentence structure choices to match audience or purpose and purposeWord choice generally supports tone and purpose but are inconsistentTone matches audience and purposeMost sentences flow smoothly and make sense | Sentence structure choices rarely match audience or purpose and purposeLimited word choice to support tone and purposeTone inconsistently matches audience and purposeSentences may be short, choppy, incomplete or unclear | Little or no sentence varietyWord choice does not support tone or purposeVoice detracts from tone and purposeSentences are often short, choppy, incomplete or unclear |
| CONVENTIONS | Correct formatFew to no errorsCorrect grammarCorrect spellingCorrect punctuation | Correct formatNot too many errorsMinimal grammar errorsMinimal spelling errorsMinimal punctuation errors | Format generally correctErrors interfere with readingSome grammar errorsSome spelling errorsSome punctuation errors | Incorrect formatErrors make text difficult to readMany grammar errorsMany spelling errorsMany punctuation errors |