In the world of the “Peanuts”, a cartoon I recall watching frequently as a child, there is mostly focus on just being a kid and enjoying childhood, where there is not much to worry about. Adults are never really seen in the cartoon and rarely heard other than being represented as a honking noise. The adult world is almost completely separated from that of Charlie Brown’s. I believe this is because as an adult, the horrors of the world become a reality. When something horrific happens such as 9/11 or the massacre that happened in Paris, young kids are mostly confused and think “this could never happen to me” as I recall reacting to the news of 9/11 when I was just six years old. Parents and other adults, however, realize that this could happen to anyone. They are the ones that are exposed and left to deal with how terrifying of a place this world can be. This is the Charlie Brown that is represented in the banner for our website.
Charlie Brown is the friendly neighborhood kid with his swirly little hair on the top of his head. In the illustration on the class header, the way his hair is normally drawn is flipped upside-down, almost like his smile would to turn into a frown, and it has. However, that is not the only thing that was flipped, it seems like his whole life has been changed, or he just grew up. Charlie seems older and not necessarily excited about life. He seems more depressed, or disappointed that maybe reality is hitting hard and the world is not such a bright place after all. Looking at Charlie get the feeling that something has happened to him recently and he is still fighting to forget, or just to repress the memory. A single image like this can tell a full story, or an infinite amount. “Je suis Charlie” makes it seem that he was impacted by the massacre in someway, whether it was that he felt the need to protest or maybe even that his best friend lost his life in the shooting. The shooting made him feel someway, and although Charlie is not necessarily a real character, that still made millions feel the need to protest their right to freedom of speech and the victims were still someone’s best friend.
The artist who produced this work simply, but brilliantly expresses an opinion. It provokes a feeling inside of the viewer, a trait I believe all art should have. After seeing this, I thought about how upsetting it is that the human race could destroy each other based on freedom, race, and religion and all of the times it has occurred in my life. I think the artist intended to leave it up to interpretation. This graphic could have a million different responses. The one thing that can be agreed upon is that the massacre in Paris is a devastating event and terrorism and murder is not how humans should act.
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Counterintuitive Spring 2024 
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Will do. Thanks for asking, entendu.
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Hey, entendu. I’m going to break with my own tradition and begin with global comments (overall essay) first, then offer some local (paragraph and sentence level) feedback. My hope is that while revising to respond to the global critique you’ll make enough changes so that the smaller local blemishes will disappear. Once the post shapes up, we can concentrate on minor copy-editing matters of grammar and punctuation.
Global comments:
What you do well here, entendu, is to choose a strong set of elements. You have the cartoon world of Peanuts, which you contrast with the real world. That cartoon world is populated entirely by children, whereas the real world is where adults are forced to live. It’s also true that throughout its shall we say 60-year history, the kids of Peanuts have never aged. Now comes this impossibility: a middle-aged Charlie Brown. He must have escaped the comic strip, right? He can only have aged if he slipped somehow into the real world where planes fly into buildings and cartoonists (cartoonists!) get murdered.
These are your elements, and as I say they’re very strong. But you confuse the presentation by shifting from the cartoon kids to real-world children (P1), and by adding the anecdote of your own youth in a paragraph that should still be establishing the nature of the unreal world of the cartoon. In fact, you try to cram most of the essay into just the first paragraph.
But then you return to Charlie in P2 to continue the work that P1 should probably have accomplished. Your P2 is your most accomplished paragraph (but you still should not save much of it 🙂 ). You haven’t quite figured out how to talk about his reality. He’s not the classic Charlie from the strip. You call him “not necessarily a real character.” Your impressions of him are unresolved, so you can’t communicate clearly to us about him. As I suggested above, one solution would be to consider him an escapee or a refugee from the Peanuts world. He might have thought he was escaping but to what grim reality? Would he go back if he could?
Your P3 makes the weak claim that the graphic “expresses an opinion” and “provokes a feeling.” No doubt true, but pretty trivial, don’t you think? If what you mean is that the character expresses “how upsetting . . . that the human race could destroy each other,” then be more direct. Tell us that the aged Charlie expresses disgust or outrage at humanity’s self-destructiveness. Don’t take refuge in “left it up to interpretation” or “a million different responses.” Yours is the only one that matters in your own essay.
Your last sentence, stated as a truism, is an inconsequential throwaway. Yes, it’s a valid claim, but it can’t be your conclusion because it doesn’t relate to the art. You could, however, claim that the despairing Charlie represents every decent human who is disgusted by terrorism and racial or religious killing. See the difference? Generalizations can work for you if they’re grounded in the specific detail of the subject matter: in this case, the drawing.
Local Comments:
Some punctuation and grammar rules are so basic they are considered unbreakable in Comp II. For example,
1) The commas and periods go OUTSIDE the quotation marks. ALWAYS! (“Peanuts,” a cartoon).
Other rules aren’t as obvious or fatal:
2) You can say “how little of this” or “how much of that,” or “how many of these,” or “how few of those,” but other than those numerical phrases, you can never say “how blank of anything.” The phrase is “how terrifying a place,” or “how enchanting an evening,” or “how intelligent a person.”
3) The human race cannot “destroy each other.” The race is the whole lot, and there’s no one outside the lot to destroy or be destroyed. You could however be upset that “humans destroy each other.”
4) A graphic can’t “have a million responses” unless it has a mind to react to itself. It can trigger a million responses in others though. Or it could be responded to a million ways.
It’s a good start, entendu: strong elements, the beginning of a good argument, and the potential for a clearer organization pattern. I would be delighted to follow the theme that Charlie somehow leaked out of the cartoon world and finds himself a deeply disappointed citizen of a grimmer world than the one he left.
Grade Code 5D3
Critique the critique: If you appreciate receiving feedback, please reply to indicate whether you found the critique helpful or not, and if so, how it was helpful.
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Thank you! I found this very helpful. After reading this I could pick out all the mistakes in my essay and understood why they were mistakes and how I could fix them.
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This is not the grade you want, entendu. Revisions highly recommended. Leave a feedback request when you’re ready.
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