Act like you are a writing teacher. Here is this prompt and a sample of my students writing. Tell me as a teacher if this sample meets the requirements and give them a score based on the rubric.: 
Prompt:
The following passage concludes an essay by Edward Abbey about Aravaipa Canyon in New Mexico. Read the 
passage carefully. Then write an essay in which you characterize Abbey’s attitudes toward nature and analyze how 
Abbey conveys these views. 
Once, years before, I had glimpsed a mountain lion in this 
canyon, following me through the twilight. It was the only 
mountain lion I had ever seen, so far, in the wild. I stopped, 
the big cat stopped, we peered at each other through the gloom. 
5 Mutual curiosity: I felt more wonder than fear. After a minute, or 
perhaps it was five minutes, I made a move to turn. The lion leaped 
up into the rocks and melted away. 
We see no mountain lions this evening. Nor any of the local 
deer, either Sonoran whitetail or the desert mule deer, although the 
10 little heart-shaped tracks of the former are apparent in the sand. 
Javelina, or peccary, too, reside in this area; piglike animals with 
tusks, oversized heads, and tapering bodies, they roam the slopes 
and gulches in family bands, living on roots, tubers, and innards 
of barrel cactus, on grubs, insects, and carrion. Omnivorous, like 
15 us, and equally playful, if not so dangerous. Any desert canyon 
with permanent water, like Aravaipa, will be as full of life as it 
is beautiful. 
We stumble homeward over the stones and through the 
anklebone-chilling water. The winter day seems alarmingly 
20 short; it is. 
We reach the mouth of the canyon and the old trail uphill 
to the roadhead in time to see the first stars come out. Barely 
in time. Nightfall is quick in this arid climate and the air feels 
already cold. But we have earned enough memories, stored 
25 enough mental-emotional images in our heads, from one brief 
day in Aravaipa Canyon, to enrich the urban days to come. As 
Thoreau found a universe in the woods around Concord, any 
person whose senses are alive can make a world of any natural 
place, however limited it might seem, on this subtle planet of 
30 ours. 
“The world is big but it is comprehensible,” says 
R. Buckminster Fuller. But it seems to me that the world is not 
nearly big enough and that any portion of its surface, left unpaved 
and alive, is infinitely rich in details and relationships, in wonder, 
35 beauty, mystery, comprehensible only in part. The very existence 
of existence is itself suggestive of the unknown—not a problem 
but a mystery. 
We will never get to the end of it, never plumb the bottom of 
it, never know the whole of even so small and trivial and useless 
40 and precious a place as Aravaipa. Therein lies our redemption. 

Requirements:
1 point
Responds to the prompt with a defensible thesis that analyzes the writer’s
rhetorical choices. 
Responses that earn this point:
• Responds to the prompt rather than restate or rephrase the prompt, and
the thesis clearly takes a position rather than just stating that there are
pros/cons.
My Student's Sample :
Nature, according to some, can be something of high volatility. It is also that very nature,
according to some has unlimited beauty. It has been a topic viewed with many different, angles and by many different people. One such person who has taken an angle on nature is
Edward Abbey, publishing an essay on his wisit to Aravaipa Canyon, New Mexico. In his essay,
Abbey is in awe of nature, seen through his use of vivid imagery to show his passion for nature
and-his use of admiring diction to emphasize nature's wonder.