Non-White America: Case Studies of Native and Japanese-Americans from 1880-1940

Bridget's feedback:

"This is a solid essay with a clear sense of purpose; each body paragraph clearly relates to the thesis, and the use of detail and reference to the source text demonstrates your work with the material. I appreciate your sense of flow and the use of narrative elements to enhance readability. Watch out for diction that prioritizes the lyrical over delivery of information (e.g., "Truly free..."), keeping in mind that your first task is analysis. In advancing this current draft toward final submission material, your main work will be in proofreading: cleaning up some errors (I spotted, for example, some incomplete sentences due to verb form choice) and bringing all formatting into MLA.

I'd like to check in regarding the prompt, including the brief note that you should discuss the ideas "according to Takaki": is the project to explicitly analyze Takaki's work and purpose in lining up the experiences of these two groups (using signal phrases directly in the text: "Takaki argues..." or "Takaki contrasts the..."), or is that direction asking you merely to use his book as reference, i.e., background for your own thesis (the current draft)?

Your prompt asks you to compare and contrast two groups that do not, at face value, seem the most profitable pairing within the assigned framework (the most obvious parallels kicking in right after the 1940 cutoff date, i.e., FDR's concentration camps and America's history of Native relocation). In meeting this challenge, your current body paragraphs are, perhaps, too enthusiastic--this is not a bad thing! However, have you considered breaking up each thematically-oriented body paragraph into two, discussing first one group's experience and then, in a new paragraph (signposted as related via a topic sentence) discussing the other group's experience? Otherwise, these are very long and dense paragraphs that, in forcing the reader to parse through the compressed detail, can make them lose the forest for the trees."

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