TPO.29

Essay topics:

TPO.29

The article states about some doubts towards using burning mirror by Greeks when they confront Roman navy at a little over 2,200 years ago. The article provides three reasons to support this doubt. However, the professor in the lecture casts serious doubt on the passage by using a number of points that are contrary to each of the author's reasons.

First of all, the reading claims that using burning mirror was impossible due to the fact that Greeks were not technologically advanced enough to use materials like this. In contrast, the professor refutes this point by saying that it is not convincing because it was not just a single shield to flame the mirrors. He mentions that Greeks use small mirror pieces.

On another hand, the article posits that based on one experience, burning mirror was impractical because it takes a long time to set the ships on fire. However, the teacher describes that maybe they had used other materials. According to the teacher, there are other stuffs like Pitch that it can set fire by second. In fact even ships were waterproof, burning mirror was an effective weapon.

Finally, the reading makes it clear that burning mirror was not an improvement in weapons and Roman army was familiar with those common weapons like flaming arrows. Conversely, the lecturer opposes this point by explaining that it is true that Romans were familiar with this weapon but you can just see mirror. We also find that burning mirror was much more surprising than flaming arrows.

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Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 22 in 30
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 13 12
No. of Words: 254 250
No. of Characters: 1220 1200
No. of Different Words: 142 150
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 3.992 4.2
Average Word Length: 4.803 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.276 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 91 80
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 60 60
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 27 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 17 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 19.538 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 7.612 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.692 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.357 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.592 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.116 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 4 4