I think I’ve received a lot of useful comments so far, and it’s definitely given me a lot to think about for revision. Writing in general is a pretty painstaking process for me, especially revision, so it’s slow going, but I’ll try to give an overview of my plan. Suzanne suggested that instead of starting out with so much background on British policing, I should start out with stereotypical views of Russia in travel writing. That way I could focus in on what is unique about McCoy’s account and then focus in on themes of her discussion of the police. I’m taking this tactic now. I’m still going to start out with background on McCoy initially, but after the first couple paragraphs I’ll go into some of the tropes in more detail rather than just rattling them off without explanation because I realized that really just confuses the focus of the paper in the beginning rather than giving helpful information. This will also allow me to incorporate the image of the wolf more, as Suzanne suggested, which I had initially planned to do but couldn’t find a way to fit in my first draft (a sign of a problem looking back on it). I think this plan will also help me weave McCoy into the paper better, which has come up in comments before, but I wasn’t really able to resolve at all in my draft.
Nancy suggested that I make my background discussion clearer and also clarify the structure of each stage in the development of policing so that the reader can see the relevance more clearly. I think that all the background information I gave definitely got confusing and vague at times, so I’m working on honing it down and keeping it to direct parallels to McCoy’s account as we discussed in class (It’s hard for me to cut out some of the not directly related stuff because I think it’s so interesting).
I think it was useful to present another paper in class. Although, I am one of those people that thinks that it always informs your own writing to edit the writing of others. It’s also just useful to see how others tackled organizing all of their research given that we’ve been discussing this in class. I don’t know how useful any comments I gave were in themselves, but I think we got a good discussion going on the papers that was helpful.
that sounds like a nice approach, to start with the tropes and McCoy to situate the source, and then to raise the theme of police as a specific angle into her interpretation. As for chopping the info on the police that you gathered-- sometimes one just has to grit one's teeth and recognize that we don't really need to include all the info we gathered. For you, there is some of that, but I also think that if you signposted the discussion more, you could retain a lot of the detail because the reader would know what the theme is -- a section on rural police, a section on urban, a section on spying, whatever. Part of the signposting might even be suggesting that "as we will later find McCoy reflecting on...," or some link to why this background is directly relevant.
ReplyDelete