I have an essay due for my HS senior English final. Don't have any friends so its available here [Imperialism, Vietnam, and Sacred Soldiers] if I could get some feedback. I changed the name of myself and the teacher for privacy; the prompt is "How do varying perspectives, points of view, and narrative techniques define the diverse experiences of a conflict?", "the conflict" being the Vietnam War. The "two sources out of ten" comment is referencing a project for this essay where we had to write notes on ten assigned sources for the final. Most sources are from my own research/reading. Unfortunately it does have to be 12 pt and double spaced even though that gives you like five words a page.

Edit: don't mind the "we are challenged with" bit at the beginning, it's been removed in the actual document

  • dinklesplein [any, he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    How much time do you have left to work on this? I'm largely concerned with the relevance of your essay to the given prompt, you're drawing on a lot of historical material and little attention is given to literary perspectives which I would find problematic if I was an English teacher. There's a lot of ways to elaborate on this, but I think in short you'll understand me when I say you've written a History essay, not an English one, and in light of this you probably need to consider sufficient revision.

    Now, if I were to critique this as a history essay.

    @MF_COOM was alluding to this same thing, but I'm going to put it in harsher terms - this paper is written dogmatically in favour of the Marxist-Leninist interpretation. Now the ML one is something that I agree with, but you would be served much better directly dismantling the liberal perspective at points rather than writing in favour of the ML perspective in a manner that comes off as uncritical at points. Consider for example, the Domino Theory - the underlying premise of Domino Theory is Democratic Peace Theory. You can use the example of the Korean War to demonstrate the farcicality of democratic peace! There just... isn't really sufficient discourse with liberal justifications for all the points you discuss. Is that a word limit issue? In general, you're writing like Lenin. Academia and the pedagogical system doesn't want stylistic Lenins, they want a Glantz or Citino.