Make sure to say what passage you're commenting on, and check that your own name is on your submitted assignment:
J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, first full paragraph on p. 139 ("If I am asked what I mean... "):
The first option you have is to explain the passage:
Mill is explaining his distinction between higher and lower pleasures. There are two ideas here. The first is that what it is for one pleasure to be more pleasurable than another is that people who've tried them both prefer the one. (Mill tells us on p. 141 that this is how quantity, not just quality, of pleasure is determined.) The second is that a pleasure is qualitatively superior to another when no quantity of the second pleasure, however large, would outweigh any quantity of the first, however small. Higher and lower pleasures are related roughly the way the first and second letters in a word are related, for purposes of alphabetization: you first rank your choices on the basis of the higher pleasures they give you, and only then do you look to lower pleasures to break ties (just as you alphabetize first on the basis of the first letter, and only then go on to the second letter).
The second option you have is to explain why you don't understand the passage:
I'm actually not sure what Mill has in mind in this paragraph, and here's why. It looks like he's telling you to determine which pleasure is qualitatively superior by asking people who've tried the two pleasures. But the examples which he gives on pp. 139-40 don't seem to illustrate this procedure: Mill says that it's better to be a human satisfied than a pig dissatisfied; but no one has ever been both a human and a pig, and so no one has ever tried out both sets of pleasures. He gives a second example (Socrates and a fool), which has the same problem. The explanation Mill gives should be illustrated by his examples, so I feel I must be misreading the passage.
Notice, first, that in a good microcommentary you try to explain, in your own words, what's going on in the passage. Don't simply repeat, with some rearranging, the author's own phrasing. If you don't understand what's going on, you have to explain why not, in a way that makes clear where your (good faith) effort broke down. Notice also that making sense of the passage (or even failing to make sense of it) requires reading it in context: both sample microcommentaries are aware of the surrounding text, and use it to try to figure out the paragraph that's being explained.
Happy microcommenting!