Assignment: Together We Stand Letter

Question

Suppose you live in a new suburban community. It offers all the amenities and benefits of a tight-knit small community, with the benefits of living close to the big city. Some years pass, and several children and adults in the community start developing extensive and similar illnesses. You think this is clearly not a case of genetics, and become suspicious that something must have gone wrong in the development planning and execution of your community. You start researching and investigating possible causes for the illnesses plaguing the community and, upon digging further, find out that the gas company’s practices may be to blame for the calamity. You decide, at that point, to spread the word around your community about your findings so that everyone can unite in a fight for justice.

· Write a letter of approximately 500 words in length that you intend to have published by your local newspaper addressing your concerns with the public health of the community.

· Explain what strategies you applied when investigating the problem that helped foster critical thinking and lead you to the root cause of the inexplicable illnesses.

· Identify approaches the community could take together to arrive at possible solutions for the problem and settle the matter with the gas company.

HERE IS WHAT I WROTE---->

To the Editor,

I would like to inform my suburban community about my investigations and research that I have been doing for the last couple of years to figure out why people from our community have been getting sick. Several members of this community have been affected from something far rather unexplainable to all, until today. I am standing up for all of us and letting all of you from our community know that the gas company is the blame for all of this. I conducted many experiments, and interviewed many of the sick adults who are hospitalized right now. They all have the same symptoms, and in my research for gas fumes, I found out that gas fumes can hurt our lungs.
The gas company may have had a leak and they were not aware of it either until today, when I let everyone know in our community. We cannot let this just pass us by, we must all stand together to let it be known that we will fight for our community. If gas fumes are inhaled for too long, we can become terminally ill. It is said that by inhaling these fumes, increased asthma, respiratory illness, and impaired lung functions can develop in time. (Wimberly 2000) “Natural gas is dirty compared to electricity. Studies by the California Institute of Technology and others have found that one breathes gas fumes when cooking. Gas fumes include methane itself, radon and other radioactive materials, BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene), organometallic compounds such as methylmercury organoarsenic and organolead, mercaptan odorants, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, fine particulates, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds (including formaldehyde), and hundreds of other chemicals.”
The strategies that I applied in order to begin my investigations were; interviewing the sick patients, observing the gas companies employees and asking questions to them, conducting an experiment of my own with a lab rat. As I interviewed these poor ill people from our community, I found out that most of them had all the symptoms of impaired lung functions and respiratory illness. I thought to myself, this has to be the reason why something was wrong with our natural gas. My investigation continued at the gas company, where I found out that, employees had been missing days at work and other employees not being able to take the shifts. This concluded in a gas leakage that made our community suffer with consequences.
I am here today, to ask all members of my community to take a stand. Not just for us, but to the people that have lost lives and those who are fighting right now in the hospital for their lives. We need to fight for the right of our community, and have the gas company pay for every cent that we have used on doctor visits and medications. We need to fight to get what we deserve. We also need to fight and make the gas company hire extra employees, so that if someone is out sick, they have a back-up person to take his or her shift. By standing together as a community, we will make sure we are all heard and there is something done to stop this nightmare.
Thank you for standing together, and making a difference for our community and for our future leaders of this community (our children.)

Answer 1

Repetitive wording: "my investigations and research that I have been doing"
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/concise.htm#redundancy
How can you fix this?

Incorrect preposition: "affected from"
What is the correct preposition?
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/verbs.htm#phrasal

Wordiness: "something far rather unexplainable"
Get rid of the unnecessary words.

More incorrect word choices: "and letting all of you from our community know that the gas company is the blame for all of this." ["from" should be "in" and "the blame" should be "to blame"]

These are the main types of things I see that need correcting throughout your paper. The content is fine, but the word choice in places is off. I suggest you find someone (NOT a classmate!!) who is willing to listen to you read your paper aloud and help you find and fix all these major and minor word choice errors.

These errors may seem like little things, unimportant things, but if you don't find and fix them all, your writing will not be polished, and your audience may not take you seriously.