Essay Sample on Grammar and Writing

Introduction

This essay is first and foremost a reflective piece on the first author's involvement in community corrections policy and practice over the past 44 years. While my line staff, supervisory, and senior administrative practitioner experiences spanned 30 years in the State of New Jersey, my perspective is national. I have provided, and continue to engage in, countless training workshops, consulting, technical assistance, and conference talks. Over the course of these 44 years, I have personally visited and interacted with community corrections practitioners in all but four states. Let me say at the outset that I have encountered some excellent examples of probation and parole agencies providing robust evidence-based principles grounded in the "what works" school of thought. Unfortunately, I have countenanced many more practitioners and policy makers who lack even a superficial understanding of principles for effective intervention, and who identify more with exclusively police-like law enforcement professional orientations than with the kind of professional orientations needed to successfully reintegrate offenders into families, neighborhoods, and communities.

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Frequently, probation and parole agencies seek to change the emphasis on probation and parole supervision from treatment to law enforcement or vice versa. When the message is more towards rehabilitation, there are frequently only loose discussions about evidence-based practices. I recently addressed a group of approximately 200 probation and parole officers in the East who work in an agency, like many others, which touts its adoption of evidence-based practices in order to satisfy the objectives of the justice reinvestment model (Clement, Schwarzfeld, & Thompson, 2011). When I asked line staff and senior administrators which evidence-based practices are being practiced, the response was "risk assessment.". When pressed a bit further about the nature of static and dynamic factors and their relationship to criminogenic needs, case planning, and the quality of services being provided to offenders, they were unable to provide explanations or additional information. I had a similar experience in 2016 while addressing probation and parole officers in the Midwest and another with an agency in the West.

Paparozzi and DeMichele (2008) laid out a model for the doing of probation and parole as follows: Treatment + Surveillance + Enforcement = Probation and Parole. The temporal ordering is intentional and imperative. In fact, this is the model that I first learned about in the daily practice of my work as a parole officer trainee starting on February 6, 1973 in Newark, New Jersey.

The question for the profession is this: Do we have the right people in the right positions in order to do the difficult, but surely not impossible, balancing of case management and enforcement?

Post

The apostrophe 's is correctly used to show possession. The author owns the "involvement."

The numerical is used instead of having it in words to an emphasis on the timespan.

Though the "state" here is not a proper noun, the first letter "s" is capitalized since the word state her is used to represent a first administrative division of a country.

"And" is correctly used in joining two subordinate clauses to the main clause so that the meaning comes out clearly.

This part consists of a list of items. The comma is correctly used to separate the various elements of the list. Furthermore, and is appropriately used between the last two elements in the list. This comma is called an Oxford Comma.

This writing of a number in words instead of figures is correct since there is no need for laying any emphasis.

The word evidence-based is a Compound Modifier. In grammar, the hyphen is rightly used to join two-word adjectives that come before nouns.

The quotation mark is correctly used to show that the word is colloquial or contextually used. The word what works has no grammatical relevance in the sentence, but it is contextually correct.

The comma is correctly placed here because it separates an adverb which comes at the beginning of a sentence from the main sentence. Also, the first letter of the first word after the full stop is well capitalized as is the rule.

In this case, the hand is a coordinating conjunction. Therefore, the comma is rightly used to precede the coordinating conjunction.

And is correctly used to join the last two items in the list. The Oxford comma is also correctly used to bring together the components of the list.

The highlighted part is a subordinate clause which is part of a longer compound sentence. Grammatically, a subordinate clause provides a sentence with additional information, but without it, the sentence still retains grammatical accuracy. Here the subordinate clause is well separated from the main clause using a comma (,).

East is a proper noun which denotes a cardinal point of the compass direction. In English, the first letter of a proper noun must be capitalized. Therefore, capitalizing the" E" in East is correct

The comma is accurately used in this compound sentence to separate the main clause from the subordinate clause.

The full stop/period is part of the sentence hence must be enclosed in the quotation marks.

2016 is correctly written in figures since it shows a year which is grammatically wrong to write in words.

The highlighted part is a section of a sentence which precedes a formula. In grammar, a list or formula is separated from a sentence explaining it using a comma.

This is an American system of writing dates and a comma is correctly used here to separate the date and the year.

The comma is used to join two related proper nouns in a sentence. Newark is in New Jersey hence the comma here shows that relationship.

The letter "D" in "Do" is correctly capitalized. In American English, in American English, the first word after a colon can be capitalized if it begins a complete sentence. The sentence after this colon is a complete sentence which takes the form of a question. On the other hand, the colon is correctly used to separate two clauses in which the second clause explains or illustrates the first one.