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Perfect Paragraph Week 2: Viruses

Submitted by aswan on Fri, 09/14/2018 - 02:20

Often a debate that arises among biologists is whether or not viruses are considered organisms or if fall into their own categorization. Viruses exist alongside all domains of life. While the presence of viruses is undoubtedly influential on life on Earth there is still heavy debate as to how to we view them, with arguments on both sides of this debate. Viruses are quite unique in their physical structure, as they are in essence very simple, consisting of genetic material either DNA or RNA wrapped in a protein capsule. The presence of DNA or RNA in viruses is often used as an argument as to why they could be considered alive as the presence of genetic material and the use of that material to reproduce is a characteristic of life. However, while they may have genetic material, viruses cannot reproduce without a host cell to infect. They also do not have the ability to generate their own energy, respond to stimuli (outside of injecting a cell with their genetic material), and nor do they have a cellular structure that biologists recognize as the baseline for all organisms.

 

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Comments

Great job! I do think that you could take out the sentence that says "with arguments on oth sides of this debate". I feel like this is implied at the beginning of the sentence. Also the sentence "Consisting of genetic material either DNA or RNA wrapped in a protein capsule" sounds a bit awkwards, so maybe you can delete the "genetic materials either" part to make the sentence flow nicely. Other than that, great work! Seems like a good flowing, informative paragraph. 

Hi! Great writing overall, I enjoyed reading about viruses. I think at times you might need a comma, but at other times certain sentences could be broken down into more than one. For example, you could split the 5th sentence up into two separate statements, but you could use a comma in sentence 3.

This was very interesting! In your topic sentence, I think you meant to say 'or if they fall into their own categoriztion'. But the topic sentence was good in that it set the tone for what the paragraph was about.