Question

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List three things that you improved during your revision.


Here’s a more human, conversational version of your essay—same ideas, but written to sound like a person thinking and talking about the works instead of an academic paper.

Both “Response to Executive Order 9066” and Sandra Cisneros’s “Mericans” are about what happens when outside forces—laws, social expectations, encounters with other cultures—try to tell people who they are. Both works show characters trying to be “American” when the official definitions and ordinary attitudes shut them out. They reach that shared idea in very different ways: the poem hits hard and fast with concentrated language and stark images that register legal injustice and loss, while Cisneros’s story lets us live inside a moment and hear the voices of children negotiating a mixed identity.

The poem’s power comes from its compression and rhetorical punch. Its language is spare and blunt; phrases that sound like legal commands sit next to intimate, human images. That contrast makes the injustice feel loud and wrong. Repetition and repeated line openings mimic the relentless force of an order; abrupt breaks in the lines can feel like lives suddenly interrupted. Imagery tied to confinement—fences, trains, packed boxes or rooms—turns abstract policy into something you can almost touch. The poem squeezes history into a few sharp, emotional details, constantly shifting between the public/legal world and private suffering. The result is a direct moral indictment: this law didn’t just change policy, it renamed people and stripped away belonging.

Cisneros’s story works differently. It shows rather than declares. Told from the point of view of children, “Mericans” is full of small, sensory details—the church’s interior, the way people move, the mocking jeers of other kids—that make the scene feel immediate. Dialogue, slang, and the label “Mericans” itself capture code-switching and the awkward, sometimes funny ways people try on identities. Cisneros builds her argument through small actions: who looks away, who imitates, who stands at the altar. Irony and quiet humor—kids trying to act like “Americans,” people caught between two worlds—reveal how messy and ambiguous identity can be. The Mexican church in an American town becomes a kind of in-between place where people perform and rework what it means to belong.

Put side by side, the two pieces show two sides of the same problem. Both lean on contrasts—public vs. private, law vs. life, an imposed label vs. inner identity—to show how identity is both forced on people and fought over. But the poem’s tight, rhetorical moves demand an immediate moral response and point to structural injustice; it reads like a witness and a protest. Cisneros’s narrative tools—scene, voice, dialogue, small gestures—build empathy and show identity as something lived and negotiated day by day. The poem makes the system visible in concentrated, universal terms; “Mericans” shows how those forces actually play out inside a community, in small humiliations, jokes, and adaptations.

Together they give a fuller picture. The poem exposes the blunt power of exclusion; Cisneros maps the quieter, complicated work of living with it—resisting, adapting, mocking, or inventing hybrid selves. Read side by side, they remind us that being “American” is not only something laws try to define, but something people keep making and remaking in ordinary moments.

Answer 1

1) Shifted voice from academic to conversational — I rewrote formal, abstract phrasing into a first‑person, think‑aloud tone so the essay reads like someone talking through the ideas. Effect: it feels more relatable and immediate (e.g., “The poem hits hard and fast…”).

2) Clarified and tightened the central comparison — I focused the argument around a clear contrast (poem’s compressed, rhetorical power vs. Cisneros’s lived scenes) and removed jargon or long qualifying sentences so the main point comes through quickly.

3) Showed rather than told with concrete examples and sensory detail — I replaced broad claims with specific images and actions from the works (repetition, fences, children’s dialogue, the church interior) so readers can feel the differences and build empathy rather than just read abstract analysis.