Your essay is good, but your thesis needs to change. You state that while people have a stigma against makeup, these makeup artists are changing the norms of art. While the “While many people look down upon heavy makeup-wearing, these makeup artists” part is excellent, the part after that should read as: “It is a unique subculture which helps women to assert their own identity in a world where women’s rights and identity are constantly under attack.” The previous quote demonstrates the position that the rest of the essay has. Your subculture is evident; you are part of the makeup wearers subculture. You take into account most of the rhetorical situation through the context in the introduction, with the quote, “On social media, specifically Instagram, Youtube, and Tik Tok, there are millions of videos revolving around beauty and makeup. Although these videos receive a lot of positive feedback and the creators receive compliments, they also get flooded with negative comments such as ‘calling it ‘false advertising’ and ‘misleading”” (Tarvin, 2018). With these negative comments, people fail to recognize the creativity that goes into creating makeup looks, especially from those who produce beauty-related content.” This quote provides valuable context to me about the makeup subculture, although you should talk more about how people perceive makeup as masking insecurities in the introduction to clarify things a bit more.

The citations on the reference page are mostly good, although “Sirin” should be an “S” in your first source, and you should do a hanging indent on each citation. The parenthetical citations are mostly good, but you should include the page numbers for the “Tarvin” source if possible. Also, you can make the quote transitions smoother by modifying your parenthetical citations. For example, in one of your citations, instead of “In ‘Extreme Makeup: How the Girls and Boys of Generation Z Created a Huge New Subculture. by Sirin Kale,” you can do “In (Kale, 2019),” and then not have a parenthetical citation at the end. For more information on APA parenthetical citations, go to https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/in_text_citations_the_basics.html.

The essay is organized but very focused and clear on the sentence level, with the notable exceptions of no subheadings to determine where one section begins and ends, and an excessively long first body paragraph. The subheadings should separate your paragraphs, with the first being “Introduction” before the introduction. The second one should be right before the first body with the term, “Makeup: a tool of Enjoyment and Empowerment.” Then, it would be best if you made a second body paragraph starting with the sentence, “In addition, Makeup wearing also represents the different subcultures a person is a part of,” as the first is too long. The subheading should occur right before that paragraph and should be named “Makeup’s interaction with other subcultures.” This new paragraph would need to expand, as you are 100 words under the word minimum, and the new second body paragraph barely has enough sentences to be a paragraph in its current situation. Before the final body paragraph, there should be a subheading called “How I Became Involved in the Subculture.” The Final subheading, near the conclusion, should be called “Conclusion.” The conclusion should also be expanded another sentence from two-sentence to three to four sentences so that you could format it into an effective final paragraph. There is also no visual element. The visual element should likely involve your makeup collection with a caption describing it. The essay does not have a dynamic title, and should be titled “Makeup: Not a Compensatory Mask but an Empowering and Enjoyable art.”

What surprised me about this article was that an essay about the makeup subculture, something I did not really care about, was extremely interesting. In fact, it changed my mind on makeup as a practice, as I previously thought it was a stupid practice, but now I appreciate its artistic nature. This persuasion demonstrates the effectiveness of your essay, which, although it is a bit rough around the edges grammar and organization-wise, has very compelling ideas. What intrigued me was your journey through the makeup subculture. It would help if you expanded more on this, as it is fascinating to learn about, and you are also under the word minimum. What disturbed me was that people perceived makeup as superficial and commented like that online, as I never thought or done that, despite having negative views on makeup myself before this essay.

-Zachary Rosman

Hi Rahul,

There are very few run-on sentences in your essay. Your grammar is solid. It got a 94/100 when I put it through Grammarly, which is generally good at capturing most grammatical errors. That said, when manually reading your essay, you are missing a few words and commas that help to provide context. For example, in the passage, “… Kanye West or Travis Scott’s own depict you as someone of a high who has more money than someone,” you are missing the word “class” or “status.” It would help if you also wrote more, albeit not much, as you are at 795 words total, five away from the word minimum. A place where you can expand is when you use words like “arbitrage” and “tranches” in a quote in your essay; I do not know what these words mean, so you have to explain this after the quote where you use them. Your argument and position is that as people have paid more and more for shoes due to demand, the prices have spiked, resulting in only the wealthiest people acquiring trendy shoes, not the average shoe-wearer. This position is obvious. Your subculture is also evident; you are a sneakerhead. You consider the rhetorical situation, as in the introduction, you state,

“The world of sneakers is an ever-growing community of people buying and selling at unprecedented rates in previous years. The subculture of the sneaker community is vast. It even has multibillion-dollar companies built around them like Goat and StockX, a “stock market” for shoes. Sneakers started gaining traction when Michael Jordan’s reign during the NBA from 1985-2003, where his shoes started becoming an icon. As time grew, various sneaker brands like Adidas also started to have their shoes become commodities. These changes lead to people paying more and more for specific shoes, and making careers off them led to be signs of social status. This is something that is unjust and benifitting those who have connections rather than the average person who wants shoes that they like.”

This text block helps to give context for what is going on for the Sneakerhead subculture and helps catch someone up who has never cared about sneakers in their life but knows about as much as the average joe about the sneakers. You do use two sources, one academic and one popular. The references look good except for hanging indents, and that the title of the “references” section needs to be changed from “Sources” to “References.” Your parenthetical references are all over the place and are not APA compliant, with the only reference being (44) instead of the proper (p.44). Also, instead of doing, “According to T. Miner’s essay Provocation on Sneakers,” for introducing the quote after, you should instead do, (Miner, [Insert year of publication here]). Also, Miner’s essay title should be in quotes instead of italics. For more information on this topic, go to https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/in_text_citations_the_basics.html.

The paper is well-organized and is focused and clear on the paragraph and sentence level. There is no visual element. I suggest that you should use an image of Air Jordans or Yeezys to satisfy that requirement, as it is a good bridge between the sneakerhead subculture who values it and the general public who has heard of it. The essay does have a dynamic title and subheadings. “Toxicity in the Sneakerhead Community” is a shocking and disturbing title, which draws the user into the report. The subheading “Social Hierarchy” also draws me in, as it wakes up a populist demon that I have, attracting me into the section. “Sneaker Reselling” is the least interesting of the bunch, albeit it still hooks me into that section. Other than that, You should add the “Introduction” subheading before the introduction and the “Conclusion” subheading” right before the conclusion.

What intrigued me are the titles and subheadings, as they attract me deeper and deeper into a paper whose topic I usually do not care about. What surprised me was that although you are a sneakerhead, your essay had a negative tone on the subculture, as most other theses of papers and papers that I saw or heard were much more favorable toward the subculture than yours. What disturbed me was people’s corrupt practices to jack up prices to get hard-earned money. If I were a sneakerhead, I would not stand for it, and as shown by your essay, neither would you. Overall, although short and rough around the edges grammatically, this essay is compelling and persuasive.

-Zachary Rosman