Research Paper

Peer Reviews of the first draft

1.

“import of Korean things in to the Japanese culture.”

What things?

 “Japan particularly benefited from the war or rather remained the most significant beneficiary. The war while resulted in severe losses for Korea it largely benefitted Japan culturally.”

You are kind of saying the same thing twice here.

 Also how does pottery connect with culture? You mention culture in the sentence above but talk about pottery for the rest of the paragraph.

 What is Neo-Confucianism?

You talk about it a bunch saying where it came from and how it got there but never explain what it is and how it functions in a society.

 What is Confucian Kobun Kokyo?  A book? Magazine? Or bible?

 Make sure to restate your argument and a brief summary of your supporting evidence and how it ties together in the conclusion.

 This is a great rough draft. Just remember to explain things a little more. I don’t know much about China and Japan and some of what you mentioned I have no idea what that is.

 

Good work

 

-Aaron

2.

Hi Sonya, I like the topics you choose and insight you offer to the rise of Japan that happened in 16th century. However, I am a little concerned. It seems like your infomation is all over the places and I couldn't pick up a main idea from your body paragraphs. A good start to revise your paper is to first rewrite your introduction.Your introduction should do the following functions: it should tell us what the problem is, what your thesis is regarding the problem as well as give us a roadmap to how you will defend your thesis.From what I read, the problem would be the phenomenon of Japan's sudden rise in culture right? Give us more information on it, narrate it in a way that can convince people that it was a sudden rise of Japan. And then move on, you will present your thesis. In your case, you said rise of Japan is due to the invasion of Korea that changed Japan enormously, right? After that, your job is to categorize the reasonings of your thesis and write it in a way that we will expect to read more about the categories in the following paragraphs, like cultural impact, social impact and so on. And also, with your thesis, my suggestion is that do not too absolute with your answer to the why question. For instance, acknowledge other factors that existed in the context that contributes to the rise of Japan. Change of legal system? Meiji restoration? While the focus of your essay is about invasion of Korea, mentioning other factors will make your essay sound less biased.  Overall good job! Best, Sunny

3.

Dear Sonya, Your paper is very interesting. However, it lacks a why question. It is mainly descriptive and it needs to be more analytical. It also needs to be structured in a better way. In this sense, Aaron's review is helpful. Some of the information and statements are repetitive. Try to consolidate information and once you have identified your question and thesis (answer to the why question), try to use only the necessary information to both make understandable your paper and to support what you propose.  Do not forget to reference your sources and edit your text. It has some mistakes. I have edited the first couple of pages, in order to show you what type of editing is necessary. Thanks, Oscar(TA)