The best way to understand the character of a society is to examine the character of the men and women that the society chooses as its heroes or its role models.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim. In developing and supporting your position, be sure to address the most compelling reasons and/or examples that could be used to challenge your position.
Is it true that to obtain an understanding of a society, especially in terms of the widely shared values and prevalent social norms, studying its heroic figures could be helpful? Few would disagree with that looking at those men and women who are praised as role models of a society reveals, to some extent, certain characteristics of a society. However, I cannot fully agree with the statement above since the main figures of a society only provide limited information about the society.
In general, it is difficult to deny that studying heroic figures of a society enhances our understanding of the community at least to some extent. For example, when the Bank of Korea issued its first-ever 50,000 won note, there was a discussion over which historical figure should be printed on the note. As a laudable and deferential female figure, Shinsaimdang was selected. She has long been respected as an ideal female figure among Koreans, for being known as a wife and mother who devoted her life to her husband and son. The fact that she has been considered as an ideal role model for Korean women shows that Koreans praises and weighs patriarchal society where women sacrifice as a wife and mother. This shows that how studying important figures of a community can help us understand some important characteristics of the society.
Nevertheless, surveying the character of the men and women that a society chooses as its heroes or its role model doesn’t always guarantee that one would obtain a comprehensive or correct understanding of the society. Given the condition of the modern society, in which a range of SNS is widely used, simply following trendy famous individuals who are lauded by the capricious and whimsical public may provide only limited information of the society. On the popular SNS, it happens every single day that a man or a woman praised and idolized by a number of people then becomes forgotten next day, as the focus of the public moves to another individual. This suggests that understanding heroes or role models of a society may only provides limited information of the society, and even if one could understand some part of the society through these individuals, the knowledge tends to be outdated so quickly as the public preference changes.
In addition, understanding those idolized individuals of a society may only cause confusion rather than deeper understanding of the community. Take Donald Trump and Barak Obama into consideration, for example. Although they both are highly popular and considered as a role model in the US, the values and ideas they present strongly conflict one another. Whereas President Obama postulates that immigrants are human resources, which will be beneficial for the US, Trump strongly argues that those immigrants would only threaten the well-being of the US citizens. Although the fact that these two conflicting figures are most lauded individuals at this moment in the US may help us to understand that the public opinion of the US is sharply divided, this does not provide us the best understanding of the society, but only confusion.
In sum, despite the benefit of analyzing important figures of a society, it is difficult to say that this is the best way to understand a society, since it often provides us outdated and conflicting information. Taken together, I cannot fully agree with the notion that understanding the characteristics of men and women who are considered as heroes/heroines or role models is the best way for obtaining a comprehensive understanding of a society.
Comments
Essay evaluation report
flaws:
'characters' means qualities or values. While the 'characters' in the examples of the fourth paragraph are like opinions.
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Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 3.5 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 20 15
No. of Words: 589 350
No. of Characters: 2913 1500
No. of Different Words: 256 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.926 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.946 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.87 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 217 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 164 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 98 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 74 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 29.45 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 9.785 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.55 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.365 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.567 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.218 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Discourse Markers used:
['but', 'first', 'however', 'if', 'look', 'may', 'nevertheless', 'so', 'then', 'well', 'whereas', 'at least', 'for example', 'in addition', 'in general']
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance in Part of Speech:
Nouns: 0.246467817896 0.240241500013 103% => OK
Verbs: 0.138147566719 0.157235817809 88% => OK
Adjectives: 0.0800627943485 0.0880659088768 91% => OK
Adverbs: 0.0518053375196 0.0497285424764 104% => OK
Pronouns: 0.0345368916797 0.0444667217837 78% => OK
Prepositions: 0.142857142857 0.12292977631 116% => OK
Participles: 0.0470957613815 0.0406280797675 116% => OK
Conjunctions: 2.96557959213 2.79330140395 106% => OK
Infinitives: 0.0156985871272 0.030933414821 51% => OK
Particles: 0.0 0.0016655270985 0% => OK
Determiners: 0.133437990581 0.0997080785238 134% => OK
Modal_auxiliary: 0.021978021978 0.0249443105267 88% => OK
WH_determiners: 0.0156985871272 0.0148568991511 106% => OK
Vocabulary words and sentences:
No of characters: 3566.0 2732.02544248 131% => OK
No of words: 587.0 452.878318584 130% => OK
Chars per words: 6.07495741056 6.0361032391 101% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.9222030514 4.58838876751 107% => OK
words length more than 5 chars: 0.371379897785 0.366273622748 101% => OK
words length more than 6 chars: 0.287904599659 0.280924506359 102% => OK
words length more than 7 chars: 0.206132879046 0.200843997647 103% => OK
words length more than 8 chars: 0.136286201022 0.132149295362 103% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.96557959213 2.79330140395 106% => OK
Unique words: 262.0 219.290929204 119% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.446337308348 0.48968727796 91% => OK
Word variations: 53.5047092113 55.4138127331 97% => OK
How many sentences: 20.0 20.6194690265 97% => OK
Sentence length: 29.35 23.380412469 126% => OK
Sentence length SD: 56.0322228722 59.4972553346 94% => OK
Chars per sentence: 178.3 141.124799967 126% => OK
Words per sentence: 29.35 23.380412469 126% => OK
Discourse Markers: 0.75 0.674092028746 111% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 4.94800884956 101% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 5.21349557522 0% => OK
Readability: 58.1404599659 51.4728631049 113% => OK
Elegance: 1.94405594406 1.64882698954 118% => OK
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.646642341652 0.391690518653 165% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence: 0.151532466631 0.123202303941 123% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence SD: 0.0961878666617 0.077325440228 124% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence: 0.570055686095 0.547984918172 104% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence SD: 0.168995860915 0.149214159877 113% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.270119185391 0.161403998019 167% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.136038496722 0.0892212321368 152% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence: 0.461317447336 0.385218514788 120% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence SD: 0.0528786422416 0.0692045440612 76% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.476021950474 0.275328986314 173% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0927786716594 0.0653680567796 142% => OK
Task Achievement:
Sentences with positive sentiment : 11.0 10.4325221239 105% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 7.0 5.30420353982 132% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 2.0 4.88274336283 41% => OK
Positive topic words: 9.0 7.22455752212 125% => OK
Negative topic words: 6.0 3.66592920354 164% => OK
Neutral topic words: 0.0 2.70907079646 0% => More neutral topic words wanted.
Total topic words: 15.0 13.5995575221 110% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
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Rates: 58.33 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 3.5 Out of 6
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Note: the e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.