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Dr Tim Barnard | History | NUS | Back to GEM2005/HY2243 |
GEM 2005/ HY2243
FILM AND HISTORY
Feedback on Essay
General Comments
When writing an essay at university level it is a good idea to read carefully through the instructions. Too many of you ignored instructions to include citations (footnotes or endnotes) and a bibliography. It also a good idea to demonstrate some familiarity with the readings for the course. You need to pay attention to small details such as putting page numbers on your essay.
Overall the essays suffer from the "I pulled an all nighter" quality of the submissions. Writing an essay is a process and you need to write a first draft and put it aside for some time, a day or two, and then return to that draft and work on it. While we appreciate the unintended humour of such errors as "Talladega Knights" and "White Thrash" these are just sloppy and should have been rectified by proof reading your essays.
Here are some tips about improving essays:
1. Do not make laundry lists. This means you should not try to cover every possible aspect that you could but rather select some important aspects around which you can construct an argument in support of your view. One way you make an argument in a module like this one is to use examples from the films to support your points.
For example, some good essays dealt with the superficiality of the advertisement campaigns depicted in the movie. One student highlighted that it did not matter whether Ricky Bobby was speaking gibberish or an intelligible foreign language when endorsing prune candy, what is important is the movie's criticism of the gullible consumerism of American society. Another student linked Ricky Bobby's paranoia about being on fire as a metaphor for the way the USA stymies itself with its paranoid foreign policy. Whether or not this latter point holds up under close examination is not the point here, the issue is that this is a way to make an argument. Students making well written arguments like these probably received marks above 70%.
2. Do not pad your essay with information that is not really relevant to the question. Specifically giving a summary history of NASCAR or the USA, but not discussing the movie is not helpful. Yes these things are related to the question and you need to know a little about them, but they are not the answer to the question. Information like this is something you take and process as part of thinking about the question. Students who submitted essays like these received marks ranging from 30% to 55% depending on the quality of their writing and extent to which they did, or did not, connect such generalities to the film.
3. Deal with the question you have been asked. Many students brought together whatever secondary material they could find into an argument based less on the film than a synthesis of their sources' points of views and subject-matter. Other students simply wrote about how the film vindicated or supported the arguments that their sources make in their articles about American history, the American South, American gender issues, American foreign policy and so on. Students writing papers like this received between 50% and 65%.
4. Be aware of the sources you are using. For instance, Pete Daniel writes about the origins of NASCAR in the 1950s. The movie was made and set in 2006. Some of you conflated the two, writing as if the movie was set in the 1950s, or even the 1970s. Also think about the sources you are using, when they were written and what point of view they are written from. For instance why does Pete Daniel write about NASCAR in the way he does? It may or may not be directly relevant to this essay that Daniel is from North Carolina, a lover of cars, came of age in the 1950s, and is currently President of the Organization of American Historians. That means his views and motivations are complex, as are the film maker's.