hopefully my opinion is justified!

I’m currently going through papers submitted to the undergraduate history journal; I’m selecting some to be eventually published in the journal. This is my first time doing this so I wasn’t sure what it would be like, but I’m enjoying it. I’ve read about four or five papers and so far I haven’t found one that I would recommend for publication. It’s not that they’re so bad… one is really great and I love it but I don’t think it’s suited for a history journal, a couple were really not too great and one or two others were medium-good. Maybe I’ll find I have higher standards than the other editors, who knows.

At any rate, after going through some other people’s papers and seeing what I think of those, I was interested in what I would now think of the paper I wrote last year for history 7B. So I opened the file and looked at it again. (For anyone who doesn’t know, my history 7B paper has been one of the things I have been proudest of in my life. It had to be entirely primary research and it was about fifteen pages long I think. I wrote on Chinese immigrants on Angel Island; the topic fascinated me so much I gave up my spring break to research and write the paper. I got an A and many encouraging and positive comments.)

Having read or attempted to read other people’s papers I think I’ve learned a few things about paper organization, so in that respect my Angel Island paper definitely needs reworking. Aside from that, though, and a few other minor details, it turns out I still think it’s a wonderful paper, in fact much better than some of these other papers I’ve been reading. So I’m very happy about that and I think I will probably submit this particular paper, reworked, for next semester’s journal. 🙂

[This post was imported on 4/10/14 from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com.]