<p>Could you grade it and give some constructive criticism,thank you in advance.
Also, I want to know whether my phrasing sounds strange to native speakers--I have never lived in an English environment , so I am not very confident about that.</p>
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<p>Assignment: Is the effort involved in pursuing any goal valuable, even if the goal is not reached?</p>
<p>Value does not lie alone in final results, but also in every single step towards it; even if the desirable end is not achieved, the effort people put into pursuing it is not a waste, because this failure will give birth to precious insights that will guide the next attempts to reach victory. Learning from failure has existed since the beginning of written history, and this skill of summarizing from unsuccessful trials makes human beings unique and is the cornerstone of the myriad success created by both human race as a whole and individuals.</p>
<p>Especially good at extracting values out of failures are the scholars. Bearing the burden of deciphering the mystery of the universe and bettering the human race, scholars has put enormous effort into their tasks, but still, great discoveries and inventions are but unusual sparks of wisdom, a stroke of luck. Most scientists and thinkers devote their youth, their stamina, their wisdom, their whole life to their undertakings, only to find out that all the attempts are in vain and that they are trapped in a maze to which the right route they thought they found is wrong. Are these scholars lamenting their failure in the death bed making no values at all? No, they have, indeed, created values. The false routes they found prevent future generations from getting lost again in th same way; the untruth they ended up with pave the path for their descendents to reach the truth. A good manifestation is those anonymous dreamers and fighters who strove to invent the perpetual motion machine. There is no denying that none of them reached their goals, but that does not make their effort worthless. From their failures in inventing a machine that can always do work without consuming any energy, Joule, Meyer and Helmholtz concluded that energy can never be created but be transformed, and this single finding based on enormous failed attempts incubates the law of conservation of energy, which lies in the center of modern physics. The efforts involved in pursuing this impossible goal of inventing perpetual motion machine have great signigicance in that they lead human beings permanently out of the wrong route of trying to create energy, into the only correct route of trying to understand the mechanism of the world in terms of transforming energy. Their struggles, though without a glorious end, have values.</p>
<h2>Not only can people extract value from other people’s failed attempts, they can also learn valuable lessons from their own failed attempts. Andy Defresne, the protagonist of Shawshank’s Redemption, provides an excellent example. Upon knowing he has a witness who can prove his innocence, Andy rashed to the warden, only to be punished by one month’s solitary and the death of the witness. This failed attempt to gain freedom makes him understand that in order to be free he has to rely on himself, and under this faith he finally escapes from the prison and reached freedom. Both Andy and the inventors of perpetual motion machine proved that things without a beautiful ending can still have values.</h2>