Japan, East Asia, and the Pacific World Source Letter Assignment 2023b

On this date on Round and Square's History 

[a] Text and illustration RF

Japan, East Asia, and the Pacific World

History 212

Autumn 2023

Preliminary Writing Assignment 

Japanese Sources: The Letter

By choosing the letter format for your first writing assignment, I am asking you to build upon the skills you have already begun to develop in analyzing (and providing examples for) Japanese source materials. You have already reached a point where you have some experience with Japanese source materials, and your job will be to explain it to an intelligent non-specialist.

[b] Reaching, teaching RF

Teach it, really.

Letters from “the field” (or our modified “archive” of source materials on the syllabus) are a good way to refine your thoughts about historical study, and they are a useful medium for beginning the intellectual “framing process” that will accelerate as we move through the next two-thirds of the course. The letter writing exercise is especially useful while studying primary source materials. 

The nonfiction writer John McPhee explains to his students that a letter is often precisely the solution to problems of interpretation or clarity—when in doubt, write to mother, he says. In this case, it is not a plea of “send money” that the letter contains, but a reworking, rethinking, and contextualization of your work. You need not limit yourself to kinfolk, but you need to think about who the recipient will be (ideally someone who will welcome a letter about “doing theory”).

You owe it to yourself to listen to this long interview with McPhee (but I know that you are pressed for time). At the very least, though, listen to the first few minutes. It is the very purpose that lies behind this assignment.

John McPhee NPR (1978) 22:40
Click on the second blue circle on the right side of the page (it is worth it)

Now start writing. Toward that end, you should pay attention to the following issues.

1. The letter needs to be “long enough” to get you deeply into several issues regarding historical research methods, including particular approaches and a few examples. There is no absolute upper limit, but I am going to make an absolute lower limit of 2,000 words (about six pages). Realistically, your letter should probably be somewhere in the 3,000 word range (about ten pages). 2,000 words (about six pages) is the bare (bear) minimum. Do not turn in an assignment shorter than that.

[c] I said, "start writing" RF

2. Just in case you think that writing 8-10 pages is a matter of spilling your random thoughts onto the page and turning it in, pay very close attention to my writing guide and our class discussions. I expect this to be a well-written essay in letter form (we'll discuss the genre in class). 

3. I am asking you to connect with a very specific reader, and to explain “Japanese historical sources" in a level of detail that she will find satisfying. You are the expert, and your “audience” is the person who will be reading your letter (think of my role as reading over her shoulder). I have found that this kind of assignment helps students to explain even abstruse matters, because the personal relationship they have with their readers demands an attention to patient explanation that is often lacking in more “academic” forms of writing, in which they assume that a professor already knows what they are writing about.

Your reader probably doesn't. 

Make it make sense.

4. You may approach your materials from any angle that you like, but you will need to “cover” at least the following items, no matter what order you choose.

          a. You must discuss the “what is a primary source?” question. Provide your reader
              with at least a few ways of thinking about it.

          b. Give your reader a sense of what you have learned up to this point about 

              how to read primary sources. Use specific examples from our course materials,
              including Lu, McCullough, Stalker, and others..

          c. Finally, give your reader some sense of what it is like to “learn through sources”

              by discussing the details of some of our texts. Again, use specific examples.

          d. The best letters will integrate the "historiographical" readings from Week II, 

              discussing your sources in terms of some of the themes in the readings from

              Collingwood, Mills, Cohen, Nagel, and LaFleur

          e. You must have at least one illustration. Think about "the rhetorical role of 
               illustrations" in the New York Review of Books.

[d] Evocation RF

5. The best way to approach the writing process is in three parts (this is a friendly suggestion). First, create a structure (we'll discuss this in class), and jot down some notes for each of the “sections” of your letter. Second, using those notes as a guide, write a rough draft of the whole letter. Third, revise, polish, and refine.  

Voilà you will have something not unlike what Alexis de Tocqueville might have written about understanding a complex, foreign culture that baffled and enticed him 180 years ago. While your letter won’t be as long as Democracy in America, it is likely—if it is done well—to be much like Tocqueville’s rich and evocative letters back to his family about encountering people, texts, and institutions in a strange land called the United States. 

You get the idea. If you don't, just raise your hand and ask me (or send me an e-mail message). I'll be happy to help.

***  ***

Letters are Due (as stapled hard-copies outside my office, MI 206)

by 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 1

Add the word count and your Beloit College mailbox number (e.g. "1127") and your word count (e.g. "2,832") to all papers.

[e] And then you may rest RF