How Bombing Nagasaki and Hiroshima Ended World War II

Bridget's feedback:

"With your overall essay structure and evidence down on the page, you can move forward in the writing process with a focus on presentation and argumentation. One task will be to work with the quotations so they are presented in a formal manner rather than piled up, forcing the reader to search for the boundaries in the absence of signal phrasing and other interventions, a task that distracts from the evidence itself. Note, too, that, while these quotations paint a solid portrait of public opinion and represent important voices in the oral history and echo trends of thought that clearly hold to this day, they do not necessarily function as evidence of the Truman administration's decision making which, as the historian and cultivator of the authorial ethos, you should be researching as part of this project.

In terms of argumentation, this current draft fails to present other sides or counterarguments in anything approaching depth; this has a negative effect on ethos, where your reader wonders if you have done research into this debate at all. A careful argument will lay out the counterarguments (alluded to in your first paragraph) and respond directly to them beyond anecdote (see above re: the veterans' quotations). For example, the reference "to show the world" severely oversimplifies the situation with the Soviets in the final days of the war and how WWII was already leading into the Cold War. "The Japanese were not going to give up" and "You can't change the past" are old saws, racist or xenophobic generalizations, and aphorisms that do not make a robust, formal argument informed by research into the historical moment.

If this paper is, ultimately, merely airing personal opinion, you will need to shift the opening diction to signal this to the reader; this will also entail a different approach to ethos and the wider rhetorical situation."

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