Why do I deserve an A?

Well, I think the first question you have to ask yourself is - do you deserve an A? If you do, the case should be easier to make, if not then harder.

So, to start with, what did the assignment ask for? In other words what were the minimum requirements? Like page length, relevance of topic, spelling, grammer, etc. Did you meet all of those? Just meeting all of the requirements is probably worth a C, maybe a B-.

Second, what level of due diligence did you do regarding the topic? Did you do research into examples of children horribly scarred for life emotionally by such pageants or examples of kids who used that as a springboard into a powerful life, successful or happy life? There isn't a hard number, but if you put in at least half a dozen real sources where you did some legitimate research and have a reasonable working knowledge of the topic is probably worth a B.

Third, did you come up with something extra? Meaning did you explore any unexpected ideas on the subject. For example - independant of the kids the Children/Beauty pageant business is a multi - billion dollar world wide industry. Did you explore the opportunities for corruption? Are children in other countries getting exploited? Does it create exposure for innocent children to the seemy underside of things like the adult industries? So, you had to do more than just speculate, you would actually have to research this and come up with a compelling thesis around this. However, if you did, have some component with depth that was a bit unexpected or past the first layer of "self esteem, college education, etc." sort of themes then I'd say it was worth an A.

Thinkingblade

well look at the objectives you had to meet when writing the original essay. did you meet them? did you cover pros and cons equally? if you were supposed to, did you come to any conclusion? was your essay well structured and clear?

i would look at all these things and other other good qualities of your first essay and discuss them. highlight what you did well and provide examples from the first essay.

Did your teacher provide you a grading rubric on what he/she is looking for in the paper. Usually they include how they are going to grade you and the scale of grading i.e Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor etc...

Go to the excellent section or "A" section and read the description for each part. Usually the parts are something like "Thesis" "Introduction" "Clarity" "Conclusion" "Bibliography". Go through and show how your paper fits these categories.