Here are the comments from my professor if you could fix them on the essay.
In addition to a thorough proofreading, it needs two things during revision: 1) a more detailed thesis statement. maybe point ahead toward your argument about Immigration and Asylum policy? 2) on that note, your transition to Immigration and Asylum policy needs to be smoother. It comes out of nowhere.
Also here are the directions that was used to write the essay.
In their introduction to Keywords for American Cultural Studies, editors Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler call upon the reader to build upon and improve their text: “to revise, reject, and respond to the essays that do—and do not—appear in this publication, to create new clusters of meaning among them, and to develop deeper and richer discussions of what a given term does and can mean when used in specific local and global contexts” (15).
With this call for collaboration in mind, your goal in our first graded essay is the following:
Come up with a keyword that isn’t included in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, but which you think should be included
Compose a researched essay about that keyword in the style of the keyword essays found in Burgett and Hendler’s book
For Project One, I am assigning you an audience to whom you must adapt your rhetoric: you are writing for the academic community of scholars who work at the intersection of American studies and cultural studies.
Now, of course, none of you have PhDs in American studies or cultural studies—but I want you to pretend that you do, and that you have been tasked with writing an essay to appear in the next edition of Keywords for American Cultural Studies. The three essays we’re looking at this week—“Aesthetics” and “Visual”—come from this book (note that what we are reading are sample essays from the online version. You can view the rest of the online version here, as well as titles of the essays published in the print book: https://keywords.nyupress.org/american-cultural-studies/ (Links to an external site.)). Both essays (as well as all the others in the book) are written by scholars who specialize in American studies and cultural studies. The audience you are writing for is the academic community represented by the authors you will find in this book.
So what’s in the book? Keyword essays! As explained in the instructions, your goal in Project One is to write one such keyword essay, modeled on the ones contained in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, and written for the same audience.
Use your thesis as an opportunity to tell your audience—again, scholars of American cultural studies—why this keyword matters to their fields of study in ways they maybe don’t appreciate currently. Or think of it this way: resist the urge to write your essay for people in general. This isn’t supposed to matter (i.e. feel like an exigence) to everybody! You’re not arguing whether the social phenomenon represented by your keyword is “good” or “bad” for people in general; rather, you’re arguing why it is important to and worthy of future research for the professionals who should be studying it. And your goal throughout the essay isn’t, in some black-or-white form, to prove that this thing is good or bad, but rather to give evidence of why it should be studied more by this field.
Here a few possible approaches to help get you started for this essay. Think of these as strategies for approaching the essay as a whole. I’ve seen other students use these successfully for this project. There are four:
1) First, there’s what I call the “anti-self-evidence” strategy: pick a term whose “meaning … becomes more elusive the closer we scrutinize it,” to quote from the keyword essay about “America.” Sometimes this is a word whose meaning has shifted over time, such as “privacy” (e.g. what we culturally define as privacy norms in the 21st century–in the age of online oversharing on FB and Instagram, for example–is very different from how we defined privacy in the 20th or 19 or etc. centuries).
2) Pick a term that has only recently emerged (e.g. “globalization”) but for which there is actually a long history of examples that have hitherto escaped both scholarly and public attention. For this sort of essay, you could draw connections between historically distant things that we otherwise, and falsely, tend to think of as unlike each other.
3) You could also take something like the inverse approach: pick a recently emerged term that really does signify some new and unprecedented cultural role or phenomenon. An example that prior students have used: “influencer.” What does the emergence of this new social role tell us about how we as a society or culture have changed more generally? (Another example is “meme.” See the previous student example I uploaded to Files.)
4) One last approach that I’ve seen a lot is to pick a word that’s frequently confused with or used as a synonym with some other word, and then to differentiate them from each other. For example, several past students have written Project One essay whose goal is to differentiate the concept of “tradition” from that of “culture.”
Grading Criteria
Ethos: __/30 points
The essays contained in Keywords for American Cultural Studies contain both primary and secondary sources. Likewise, in order to demonstrate credibility on your chosen keyword, you too should be working with primary and secondary sources. Integrate at least two primary sources and at least four secondary sources into your essay, and cite them correctly in MLA format. We’ll talk about both kinds of sources (and how to cite them) in class.
Logos: __/30 points
The essay should be logically organized and should develop in a way that supports the initial claim made about the keyword at the beginning of the essay. Each new paragraph should be clearly identified by a topic sentence that builds upon and/or transitions logically from the topic of the previous paragraph.
Exigence and Audience: __/30 points
Your basic exigence in this essay is that you need to convince your target audience—Burgett and Hendler, as well as other scholars of American culture—that your keyword is important enough to include in the book. It is in this sense that the essay is an argumentative one with a specific rhetorical situation. Accordingly, you need to make the case that your keyword is one worth thinking deeply about in the first place. One strategy for doing this is to pick a keyword whose definition most people tend to take as self-evident, but then to show that definition to be debatable, contested over, or unsettled in some important fashion. We’ll look at this strategy (and others) while discussing our class readings from Keywords for American Cultural Studies.
Grammar/proofreading: __/10 points
The essay should be clearly written, proofread, and free of grammatical and spelling errors.
-Times New Roman font, size 12pt
https://keywords.nyupress.org/american-cultural-studies/
https://keywords.nyupress.org/american-cultural-studies/essay/aesthetics/
https://keywords.nyupress.org/american-cultural-studies/essay/visual/