Law in Contemporary Society

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YinanZhangFirstPaper 4 - 01 Apr 2009 - Main.MichaelDreibelbis
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  • I think this is a draft before the draft, as it were: it seems to me to have collected in one place many of your thoughts, along with some relatively familiar statements that one would hesitate to characterize as thoughts. But there's not much structure of flow or development given to these thoughts, no thesis, no development of the idea through multiple stages of explanation, no real conclusion. I think the most important step to the improvement of the paper is to ascertain what your most significant idea is, in your view: the point you want to convince people of. Then the essay should be reorganized around that theme.
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It's a little bit misleading to simply state that "approximately 40% to 50% of couples divorce" and leave it at that. This New York Times article paints a significantly more complicated picture. Most relevantly:

"The highest rate of divorce in the 2001 [Census Bureau] survey was 41 percent for men who were then between the ages of 50 to 59, and 39 percent for women in the same age group."

and, most relevantly for us:

"for college graduates, the divorce rate in the first 10 years of marriage has plummeted to just over 16 percent of those married between 1990 and 1994 from 27 percent of those married between 1975 and 1979.

About 60 percent of all marriages that eventually end in divorce do so within the first 10 years, researchers say. If that continues to hold true, the divorce rate for college graduates who married between 1990 and 1994 would end up at only about 25 percent, compared to well over 50 percent for those without a four-year college degree."

I think your paper might be more useful in advancing the conversation if it addressed the complexity of the situation head-on, or perhaps focused more directly on the state of marriage within a certain group within the broader "Americans". Though bearing the same name, "marriage" means something completely different for a couple of 19 year olds who never go to college than it does for 27 year old professionals.

-- MichaelDreibelbis - 01 Apr 2009

 
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" on the next line:

Revision 4r4 - 01 Apr 2009 - 04:35:11 - MichaelDreibelbis
Revision 3r3 - 31 Mar 2009 - 22:54:14 - EbenMoglen
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