Critical Review of Speaker Presentations
These reviews should be approximately 500 words in length and should
stress the
strong and weak points of the speaker's presentation. Feel free
to comment on both
the substance and style of the speaker.
Critical Book Reviews
The major problem with book reviews is that they tend to be too
descriptive
and not
adequately analytical and critical. To facilitate doing
the review, you may want to
list the strong and weak points of each book as you read through
it.
Try to make your
review as professional as possible and it might be useful to look at
reviews in
publications such as the New York Times Book Review (each
Sunday),
the Journal of Asian Studies, and Pacific Affairs (for models
of reviews).
The review expected of undergraduates should be approximately 1500
words in length.
Your first two reviews are due by November 12 and third review is due
November 26.
Graduate students should note that the article for the first week in
the Bulletin of
Concerned Asian Scholars is a good example of an integrated
review in which
several books are review simultaneously. The integrative
review should be
approximately 1500 words in length. The review of Krugman
should be approximately
500-750 words in length. These two reviews are due
November
26.
Final Research Paper
The research paper will be due by 5 PM on Wednesday, December 10 in
room
837 PLC. It should be approximately 5,000 words in length
and typed. Try to
make your paper as much like one which appears in a scholarly journal
as possible and
please be consistent in your bibliographic style.
I would suggest embedded notes
(Krugman 1996: 23) or (Geertz 1995: 3) as an example, with full
references
in
the bibliography or references cited section at the end of the
paper.
End notes
or footnotes are, of course, acceptable as
well.
The topic is flexible. Your paper
may deal with the Pacific region as a whole, a specific country of
interest to you,
or a comparison of countries.
In doing your research, try to rely on a balance among books, articles,
and internet
sources. Use of other language sources is encouraged.