busy week

Hi girls!

Oh man, can you believe we have all these things due next week. It’s going to be a busy week for us. I hope everyone finished reading My Country versus Me and their response papers, studied for their exams, and found the book they’re going to write on. Whew! That’s quite a lot to do huh. But I’m sure we’ll get through this week soon enough.

So what did everything think of My Country versus Me? I thought it was a very interesting. It was an easy read but very deep. The things that happened to him must have had a great impact on him and his family. But I won’t get too into the book. I’ll save that for next week.

How did everyone do on their essays? I hope everyone did, seeing that only 2 people got A’s. Did any of you get helpful comments that could benefit the rest of the group (like any good advice)? I’ll start by telling you what advices I got from the professors. Let’s start with the good comments shall we? So one of the things that is good is that my essay is “tightly written and does a fine, concise job of addressing [my] thesis.” They said that stylistically, my “writing is clear and well-constructed; there were very few instances of confusion as to syntax or diction, and most of [my] paragraphs not only demonstrated an inner coherence, but also transitioned smoothly into each other.” The bad points: there are several points at which [I] begin to lose parts of the argument [I] had lay out in my introduction. This distracts from the essay’s overall conceptual unity-and, to some extent, the reader’s ease in following the logic of all of [my] arguments. For my next essay, I am advised to be more vigilant about making sure all parts of my essay hang together, and that I make it clear to the reader how certain parts of the argument fit into the overarching framework of the essay. Ok, I hope that helps you girls in your future essays. If you don’t mind, maybe you can also post some of your feedbacks from the professors.

So what is everyone writing their next essay on? I think I’m going to write my essay on A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee. This is the book I did my presentation on and so I think I have the most knowledge of this book out of all the books I’ve read in this class. But still, I have not narrowed down my ideas for a thesis. There can be so many topics to talk about. It can’t be anything too broad and yet, it can’t be too detail or else there won’t be enough to talk about. I might talk about the relationship between Hata and his daughter, Sunny. I know that’s really broad for now, but I’ll figure something out before the conferences this week. I really hope I’ll finish everything on time. Good luck girls!! Please feel free to bounce ideas off us.

Jennifer Yeung