COMPARATIVE BOOK REVIEW – 20% of course grade:
Using the two memoirs of the war in Vietnam, Caputo’s A Rumor of War and
Moore & Galloway’s We Were Soldiers Once… And Young, write an 8-page
(double spaced) comparative book review. Your review should put these books in
historical context, and compare and contrast the different perspectives of the
authors of these two volumes. Considering the audiences for each book, please
explain why these authors take such radically different views of the war in
Vietnam. Students are encouraged to make use of published book reviews and
other sources in evaluating these books.
Please make use of the writing advice in this outline when writing your
essay and feel free to contact Dr. Nance in advance if you’d like help getting
starting, structuring your essay, or verifying your argument. After the due
date for any given short essay, its Dropbox will remain open for a further four
days (96 hours) during which time students can submit assignments with a late
deduction of 5% per day, to a maximum of four days, after which the Dropbox
will close and no further assignments will be accepted. I can no longer accept
papers by email.
SOME WRITING ADVICE :
Use active voice (to explain WHO did what & why)
Discuss events in chronological
order
Essays are more persuasive if they have a beginning, middle, and an end
Know the difference between a descriptive statement and an analytical
argument
You know you have an argument if you are answering a how or why question
Try to make connections between historical topics (eg. women’s rights and
the fight against slavery; the terrible irony of enslaved people working land
confiscated from sovereign Native American nations)
If you can, try and show change over time in your Essa
Don’t be deterred from
discussing historical phenomena that seem contradictory, confusing or hotly
debated! The past was just as complicated as our present is today, so our explanations
of the past need to be nuanced and complex — there are seldom black and white
explanations; most of history is in the grey areas and contradictions in
between.
In the short essays required by
this course, do not lose marks at the beginning of your essays by using up
valuable space on “just-getting-warmed-up-here!” kinds of sentences
that either restate the essay questions without answering them OR make big,
bland statements (eg. “Human history has been shaped by the environment…”)
that don’t address the specific history we are asking you about. While you are
writing a draft, these kinds of sentences are fine if you need to get going.
But once your essay is written and you have thought things through, take the
time to go back and either delete those sentences or revise them with specific
detail. Essentially your introduction should name the context, time, place, the
players involved; then, briefly name your argument that answers a how or why
question about the that context, time, place, players and process. A brief
paragraph will do.
