Dear Emily Schoening,

While your title does address the issue in regards to how it affects college students, it is too broad and
does not provide a clear assessment of what the proposal will be discussing. While it does not need to
explicitly state that your proposal is to institute a community garden, it should be more focused on the
nutritional aspect of college lifestyles. Your second and third paragraphs do a good job at establishing
the problem and explaining why it is a significant issue. By relating these issues to SVSU and providing
examples that exist on campus you help give the problem presence and create a persuasive
presentation of the problem. You also imply in your explanations that the problem is solvable, as long as
the students and the campus take the correct actions. In your fourth paragraph you effectively use
pathos to create a sense of fear in the readers about the negative consequences associated with not
taking action, such as obesity, depression, diabetes, etc. This helps to add to the importance of the issue
and encourages your readers to listen to your proposal and to take action. Your proposal for a
community garden is very clear and to the point. Including evidence for the TED talk with Ron Finley also
helps show readers that your proposal has already been implemented and shows that it has a
probability of being effective. You give a very detailed plan about not only the implementation of the
garden, but also how to maintain and pay for the garden. It might help to include a little more
information about how to actually construct the garden. You discuss how to find an area to put the
garden and getting students to maintain it but there is not a lot of information about obtaining the
materials to actually construct the garden. However, you’re assessment of the pros and cons help to
express why people should support your proposal. Your proposal does a good job of providing evidence
of the positive effects of implementing a community garden, and you provide strong evidence of other
instances where a community garden has provided positive benefits. However you tend to provide more
evidence regarding the physical benefits and don’t spend as much time on the psychological ones. If you
were to include a little more explanation about how the garden would improve the mental health of
college students it would help to further support your argument for why people should support your
proposal. Including more information about the benefits to college students would also help appeal to
the values held by your target audience, college students who would be creating and maintaining the
garden. Overall you did a great job of explaining your proposal and backing it up with evidence. After
reading your proposal I would be on board with creating a community garden at SVSU.

Sincerely, Madison Richardson