Alice - Week 9 - Paper Revisions

I'm currently in the process of figuring out exactly how I do want to structure my paper - I got a few plans suggested from my readers and from Nancy and Suzanne, which were all really helpful. And talking about Aysha's paper structure definitely helped too - I say that I had also come up with good analytical points but was lacking a good structure or introduction. To help with it, I printed out my paper and marked out where the following sections were now - political background, typical French ideological treatment of the Ottoman Empire, and the religious background leading into how Chardin is different - and created a new word doc where I color coded them so I could easily move them around. I think the way I want to go is the way Suzanne suggested: After the expanded intro which now includes Chardin's bio and journey/publication timeline, I'll go into the French ideological imagination of the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century, and some examples of how Chardin is neither anti-French nor anti-oriental, though either prefacing or ending with some hints that he won't completely fit in with this. Then, the six pages that I have on political background, though I've been crossing out all the unnecessary parts that I can and hopefully it will now be four pages (three's too ambitious... I like that part). That sections ends with a paragraph explaining how Chardin was typical of his time, which is the same paragraph I ended the political section with initially (including the last line "But this isn't the whole story..."); it will be a little lengthened to bring in the ideological points on which Chardin agreed with his contemporaries (Europe as superior because of scientific advancements, the Orient as unchanging). The next three big steps before final edits are: 1) adding in the rest of my analysis of Chardin, then stepping back and maybe reordering all the little parts of that section to make them more coherent (especially since some of them were points of similarity, which will be moved to the beginning of the paper with the traditional French view); and 2) Working on my transitions throughout since I'm chopping it all up and reordering it, and 3) Getting a really good introduction, which mainly will be figuring out how much of my main point I want to betray up front. At this point I think I'm going to stick to a bare bones "But because he was a Huguenot, he didn't fully fall in with the traditional Catholic French treatment of the Orient, and therefore he was able to take a much more objective stance on the culture of the Ottomans and Persians" - and not really a big roadmap. My aim for before the weekend is to have all of the restructuring and analytical additions finished, and then before Wednesday to get in the transitions and good introduction, so I have two days to really make sure the argument is coming through and is well prefaced with the introduction, and to write a good conclusion for the whole piece.