MD Nasif Hassan English 111 Wendy Paff Assignment 2 01/26/09 Evaluation, T.S. Eliot In the Essay “A Long Road to Fame”, the writer, Lamar Woodson, describes a singer, Jonathon Xavier’s road to success from a choir singer in a church to a famous artist who sold nearly ten million copies of his debut album. While reading the piece I found quite a few grammatical errors. I also found out that Woodson has used a lot of the punctuations improperly and in some cases haven’t used them at all. The punctuation errors include improper and sometimes no use of commas, semi-colons, full-stops, and quotation marks. There are also some spelling errors and some of the words are repeated. The piece definitely needed to be more carefully proofread. The sentence structure could also be improved. Some of the sentences are too long and combined with missing punctuations, it can get confusing for the reader. The essay does not contain enough details about the artist in general or to create an argument about T.S. Eliot. For instance, Woodson does not even mention where Jonathon is born or what nationality he is. Also he says that the singing competition will be held “Downtown in the Warner Empire Building”. This raises questions in the readers mind such as, where the place is, what country or state or city it isin. Throughout the piece, Woodson does not mention whether Jonathon follows the tradition of any particular genre of music. Even the genre of his first album is not mentioned. Woodson, also, does not let the readers know whether Jonathon studied or followed the work of any artist in particular. Throughout Woodson’s piece, Eliot’s ideas aren’t addressed or responded to correctly. For instance, Jonathon’s father told him “that he must follow the tradition of any other famous singer” in order to be successful. One might wonder, doesn’t the genre at least have to be similar if not the same? The piece also says that Jonathon realized that “he would have to look at other artists’ mistakes so that he can learn from them, in order to gain individual talent”. This is not quite what Eliot was trying to say in his essay. Eliot says that an artist, in order to be successful, needs to know and study the artists from the past and their work. According to him an artist’s work should be such that it can be compared to those of his/her predecessors. Eliot, further, says that an artist’s art doesn’t necessarily have to be completely created from his/her experiences. An artist’s talent is revealed by how well he describes and presents his art in contrast with those from the past and may comprise solely of imagination or may even be a combination of imagination, feelings and real-life experiences.