Satirical Persuasive Essay for Honors

Homework is an amazing thing. At the end of the school day, when children are depressed and upset because school's over, there's no more worksheets to do or problems to answer, and there's just free time between now and the start of the next school day, homework arrives to save them from the boredom of freedom and prevent their precious minds from the evil, corrupt influence of fun. Fun teaches children that slacking off and relaxing can be enjoyable. This will NOT be tolerated.
Having homework constantly every night trains the children's minds to believe that there is no free time, no fun, and nothing but work in life, effectively brain washing them. The practical application of this is that the process makes them into lifeless, hollow, obedient minions to do our bidding. Once this process is complete, every teacher will receive his or her own set of thirty or more minions to do the will of each teacher. By steadily increasing the magnitude and pointlessness of the workload, we can increase this mind-wiping process approximately threefold.
Children learn nothing from homework; this is a well known fact amongst teachers and faculty. This causes the children to believe that they cannot learn and think on their own, ergo, they become dependent on the teacher for learning. They believe whatever the teachers, figuratively, throw at them, without checking the information out for themselves to verify the validity or falsehood of said information. So, by beginning to slip in personal inflections and thoughts to the smorgasbord of information, the teacher can begin to train his or her children to think and behave the way that he or she does, and the children will blindly devour the teachings like starved puppies.
Once the teachers have finished properly training their children, they can commence phase two of the grand plan. They will march to D.C. and force Legislature to ratify a law setting mandatory minimum wage for all personnel involved in education and instruction to a grossly high number. By doing this, they will finally achieve the appropriate earnings and respect for arduous, but necessary, task that is keeping America from becoming a land of grossly uneducated swine more than it already has.
Then, once the government of the United States of America inevitably collapses, the teachers shall rally together under a new flag and establish the United National Education Temples of Happily Iconic Candidates of the American Legion, or U.N.E.T.H.I.C.A.L. for short. This entire scenario is pure gold, foolproof, and definitely not the byproduct of a 16-year old student's desire to provide a logical-yet-satirical way to write a persuasive five-paragraph essay for his Honor's English 10 class. So, more on the main point, homework is good, and children need more.

Well, for starters, I'll point out the two mistakes I noticed. The second sentence is a bit awkward. I would suggest taking out the comma here:

...or problems to answer and there's just free time...

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And a typo here:

...without checking the information out for themselves to verify the validity or falsehood...

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Well, then. I like your essay; truly I do. It's funny in an ironic, corrupt way. The point of your essay is to explain why homework is benefical while you obviously believe otherwise. Plus, you dictate that hw keeps a student from laziness, but end your paper with a "Ireallywanttofinishthissoyeah" attitude. All in all, it was very entertaining, and quite humurous considering the relatively serious medium it is written in. Good work, and I hope to read more!

Thank you very much for the feedback and pointing those two things out! ^.^ I will rectify the second of the two, but the reason for the comma is to end the list:

At the end of the school day, when children are depressed and upset because school's over, there's no more worksheets to do or problems to answer, and there's just free time between now and the start of the next school day,

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Thank you for reading and responding though!

Ah. A Modest Proposal fan, eh? Well, this is certainly pretty Swiftian, if not predicated on as extreme a premise. You clearly know precisely what irony is and how it works (oh, how I wish I could say the same for some other people I know; I'm afraid I've both confused and offended them terribly), which is always nice, and you've applied it well in this piece.

I would suggest, though, that you leave a blank space between each paragraph here - it doesn't matter on the page, but on these forums, where there's no indent at the start of a paragraph, it makes it so much easier to read.

Right. Boring layout stuff out of the way. Let's get down to business.

At the end of the school day, when children are depressed and upset because school's over, there's no more worksheets to do or problems to answer, and there's just free time between now and the start of the next school day, homework arrives to save them from the boredom of freedom and prevent their precious minds from the evil, corrupt influence of fun.

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This sentence is long, and since it's only got commas in, it drags a little. You earlier defended your Oxford comma (the one between 'answer' and 'there's') and I agree with you; there's often a case to be made for including it, and I think you're right to do so here. But I do think you ought to either split this sentence into two smaller ones, or slightly rearrange the words and put a semicolon in the middle, so that you end up with something that has the power of two sentences in one. You can extend a sentence with all the commas that you like, and keep going on and on, and the sentence will still work and keep going, but it seems to keep the reader working, slowly decelerating on like a car running on fumes, until they finally grind to a halt on the inevitable full stop. That last sentence is a pretty good example of what I mean.

Stick a semicolon in, however, and it becomes so much easier to read that it's almost miraculous; after all, you can clearly see that this sentence is, like my last, ridiculously long, but the power of the semicolon is keeping it going; you could even, if you want to be rather bold and slightly old-fashioned, use more than one semicolon per sentence, as I've done here. Just be careful not to get addicted - one of the most common problems for writers is an addiction to semicolons. I'm not even joking about that.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, review. Going back to that quote I mentioned, you used the phrase 'school day' twice in the same sentence; in general, you want to avoid repeating yourself in such an obvious way in the same paragraph, or at within about one hundred words. Consider replacing it; it won't jar on the reader's eye so much that way.

They believe whatever the teachers, figuratively, throw at them, without checking the information out for themselves to verify the validity or falsehood of said information.

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This is a clumsy sentence. It'd work great without the 'figuratively' in it; it throws off the rhythm and makes the whole thing very inelegant. I suppose you're doing it to help with the tone you're cultivating, in which case you could do this instead of excising it:

They believe whatever the teachers throw at them (figuratively, of course), without checking the information out for themselves to verify the validity or falsehood of said information.

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You also repeat 'information' twice here. I guess that's quite 18th century of you, but it's still undesirable.

There aren't actually many problems with this. The one or two that you do make, you repeat a couple of times throughout the piece, but it's still excellent, and great fun to read. The only real problem I have with it is that homework seems like such an odd choice of topic for this sort of satirical essay; to make it really effective, you ought to choose a completely ludicrous one. Swift chose cannibalism; when I did something like this, I chose baby testing (which is like animal testing only with babies). The more insane the concept, and the more logical and rational you make it, then the more effective and entertaining the final essay will be.

For all that, yours is still great. I thoroughly enjoyed it - but there's a chance that if it had been slightly different, I might have enjoyed it even more, and since an author is (and here I speak from experience) a glorified entertainer, that's always something to bear in mind.

If you ever post any more, you can be sure I'll look it up.

F.A.B.

Thank you very much for your thoughts, Cutlerine! I am a rather big fan of your hack, Pokemon Snakewood, but that's beside the point. The reason that I wrote this on homework was because the assignment in my 10th grade Honor's English was to write a persuasive essay on something I felt strongly about, and, as you can probably tell, I strongly dislike homework. The kids in my class and my teacher knew that, so I figured I'd write something entertaining for it, rather than some humdrum run-of-the-mill essay. I do rather enjoy irony. :)