Question

Submit a 4–5 paragraph essay that compares and contrasts Village Life in America and A Confederate Girl’s Diary. Draw conclusions from both texts to make your points. Support your statements with quotations and evidence from the texts. Write using clear and varied sentences.
At the end of your essay, list at least three revisions or edits that you made to your paper. Briefly comment on your experience with peer editing and how that experience influenced your final draft.
Make sure you review the grading rubric so that you understand how you will be graded.

Answer 1

Miss Richards’ marriage to Mr. Edmund C. Clarke occurred in 1866. Mr. Clarke is a veteran of the Civil War and a Commander in the Grand Army of the Republic. His brother, Noah T. Clarke, was the Principal of Canandaigua Academy for the long term of forty years. The dignified, amusing and remarkable personages who were Mrs. Clarke’s contemporaries, teachers, or friends are pictured in her Diary just as they were, so that we meet them on the street, in the drawing-room, in church, at prayer-meeting, anywhere and everywhere, and grasp their hands as if we, too, were in their presence.

Wherever this little book shall go it will carry good cheer. Fun and humor sparkle through the story of this childhood and girlhood so that the reader will be cheated of ennui, and the sallies of the little sister will provoke mirth and laughter to brighten dull days. I have read thousands of books. I have never read one which has given me more delight than this.

Margaret E. Sangster.    

    Glen Ridge, New Jersey,

        June, 1911.

xiiiTHE VILLAGES

CANANDAIGUA, NEW YORK.—A beautiful village, the county seat of Ontario County, situated at the foot of Canandaigua Lake, which is called “the gem of the inland lakes” of Western New York, about 325 miles from New York city.

NAPLES, NEW YORK.—A small village at the head of Canandaigua Lake, famous for its vine-clad hills and unrivaled scenery.

GENEVA, NEW YORK.—A beautiful town about 16 miles from Canandaigua.

EAST BLOOMFIELD, NEW YORK.—An ideal farming region and suburban village about 8 miles from Canandaigua.

PENN YAN, NEW YORK.—The county seat of Yates County, a grape center upon beautiful Lake Keuka.

ROCHESTER, NEW YORK.—A nourishing manufacturing city, growing rapidly, less than 30 miles from Canandaigua, and 120 miles from Niagara Falls.

AUBURN, NEW YORK.—Noted for its Theological Seminary, nearly one hundred years old, and for being the home of William H. Seward and other American Statesmen.