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| Benjamin Nolot's documentary nefariousdocumentary.com |
Note: For a quick look on how the essay is structured, here is a link to an outline that I made for the paper.
Throughout the essay, Mikayla Gerdes-Morgan does a very good job on keeping her points connected with her thesis. First, she makes her thesis clear by placing it at the very end of her first paragraph: "Through the use of reenactments and cinematography, Nolot effectively illustrates the dire need for the cessation of human sex-trafficking and appeals to his viewers' emotions." Already, readers know that she will be focusing on how Nolot uses two things, reenactments and cinematic portrayals, to not only show the reasons for eliminating the trafficking industry, but also present how and why those two things appeal to the audience's emotions. From there, she ensures that her topic sentences relate to the thesis: in fact, three of the four topic sentences in the body of the essay include some derivative of the phrase "appeals to his viewers' emotions." By continuously connecting her topic sentences with emotional responses, Gerdes-Morgan creates a unified paper that is focused on narrow subjects, allowing her to truly explore the how's and the why's of her subjects.
Although one may have excellent theses and topic sentences, both matter very little if they do not have viable pieces of evidence to support them; and Gerdes-Morgan appears to be very aware of that fact. Her one source of information is Nolot's documentary, from which she is basing her essay; but she draws out specific details within the documentary that prevent the evidence from sounding too generic or possibly fabricated. As she writes her essay, she is very cognitive on maintaining unity between the evidence and the thesis at hand--she chooses parts from the documentary that pertain to the emotional effects of being in the trafficking industry and interprets each one to reflect how they evoke an emotional response from the viewers themselves. For instance, in the fourth and fifth paragraphs (two of her strongest paragraphs in the essay), she mentions two scenes in the documentary that feature simulated moments of trafficking. One scene involved a man beating a woman, and another scene depicted a woman crying in her bedroom. Gerdes-Morgan pays particular attention to the camera frames in both scenes. For the first scene, she notes that the camera frame was from the woman's perspective and was gradually decreasing in size and fading into blackness, indicating (according to Gerdes-Morgan) that the victim was slowly disconnecting from her reality to cope with the trauma and relating the direct perspective of the scene with the audience's own visual perspective, which is the same as the victim's. For the second scene, Gerdes-Morgan points out how a circular frame was closing in on the woman while the image was becoming more distant and states that the circular frame is similar to an emotional tunnel in which the victim's hope becomes smaller and smaller over time. Also, she notes that the camera perspective is actually above the woman, a viewpoint that would create an urge to help the woman among the audience. Especially in these two paragraphs, not only does she choose effective pieces of evidence to support her topic sentences, but she also interprets each one in terms of cinematography and emotional appeal in the audience, the two primary subjects found in her thesis, making both paragraphs exceptionally strong and unified in purpose.
However, not all of her paragraphs are of the same caliber as the other two. The third paragraph does present a piece of evidence, but it is the only one in the paragraph and suffers slightly from repetition in the two interpretations that Gredes-Morgan provides. This paragraph would be better if there was something cinematic that could serve to further elaborate the interpretation that the author provides. Besides that paragraph, the rest of the essay is a very good one.
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