Overall comments for everyone history in past tense no hypothetical questions academic writing hst195 assignment 1 comments Terrific first assignment. Yours was one of the best ones in the class. *** NICE 6 Overall, nice job on this first assignment. Excellent analysis of the credibility of the speaker you chose in Part 1. That was the most difficult part of this assignment, and your paper made a worthy attempt to deal with this complex subject, just as the one you are dealing with in Forum 1. *** SINGLE STORY ANSWER TO ALL 5 Be careful not to use a single story to "come to a conclusion" for the U.S. failure in the Vietnam War. At this point, you definitely do not have all the facts, a single account from someone who was there cannot provide you with all of the evidence you need, and it reveals wild speculation and/or dubious analysis on your part. *** TOO BRIEF 1 While your paper was "on topic", it was a bit too brief to constitute a weeks worth of work, addressing the reading and posed questions in an in-depth manner. Be sure to ponder and elaborate in more detail on future assignments. *** SPELLING 2 As gently as I can, I want to remind you to check your grammar and spelling/typos before you turn in your assignments in this fully online class. Whereas the internet allows for communication filled with slang, abbreviations, lack of capitalization or punctuation (and I'm not saying your assignment suffered from ALL of these faults), the academic nature of this class requires a more formal form of writing. Since we have no other basis to "know" each other, I can only "know" you from your written work and assign scores and grades accordingly. ***ANALYSIS 3 The weakest part of the assignment for you (it was for a majority of the other students as well) was the part on reliability and trustworthiness of the speakers. While "they were there", in some cases, this makes them "too close" to the conflict. As a result, they can only speak to a VERY small part of the larger war. Was their small part the "exception" or the "norm"? Finally, they can't all be equally believable. For instance, the Vietnamese perspective comes from individuals who have been chosen by the communist government of Vietnam and "allowed" to speak with this Western writer named Appy. In a country without freedom of speech, is the account we read accurate? And for that matter, just because we live in a country WITH freedom of speech, does it make an account truthful? ***ANSWER MY QUESTIONS 4 While you did complete the assignment on time, you failed to address the numerous questions that I posed in the prompt. Be careful when reading the instructions in this online class and address everything asked. Be sure to check your paper before you turn in your assignments in this fully online class. Ron on sentences seem to be your main grammar weakness. Overall, nice job on this first assignment. I do sincerely thank you for your backstory, but one negative part about where I think you are coming from is this. To me, it read a bit like an "excuse". (I realize this is a sensitive family subject, so I'm trying to be careful with my written word choices here.) Using your family history as a reason for why you cannot judge others is basically *not allowed* in this course. Of course we have to be careful about judging historical figures by our 2010 standards (presentism), but we certainly get to take an analytical look back at this troubling chapter of our country's history. And the more facts and data we have at our disposal, the better we can support our points of view. MY FEEDBACK I very much want to provide you with valuable feedback on your work. If my comments above are not clear, or you have more questions, please feel free to speak with me, either via Moodle messaging, office hours, or even a phone call. The most difficult part of online classes, from my perspective, is giving valuable feedback to students in an efficient manner. If I had to type up everything I had to say when reading your paper, the task would be