Santa Monica College Speech and Slavery in the West Indies by Fara Dabhoiwala Summary

Again, as part of building up your reading skills/ writing foundations please read the review article: Download it here: Speech and Slavery in the West Indies .

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I would like you to simply write a 4-5 page summary of the article. Double spaced as always, but please do not put double double spaces between the paragraphs it is incorrect and it looks like you are just trying to get to the page limit. Please don’t make me reformat it so as to show you that in fact you have only written 2.5 pages. 12 point font as we said before and standard 1 inch margins. Please don’t blame the “computer” for problems with the format : go in there and change it so that it is correct and presentable.

NB: Several people got both Cohen and Trentmann’s name wrong in their summary: please don’t do it to this author of the article or the author’s of the books being discussed. Also: pretty basic but please use possessive apostrophes: if you write “Cohens book” instead of “Cohen’s book” : it doesn’t look good…

Hint: if you notice at the top of the article it is a review of three books all covering a similar topic. The author of the review is this chap: Fara Dabhoiwala

He has written a review of three books : One by Miles Ogborn, one by Vincent Brown, and one by Tom Zoellner. Two of the books are published by Harvard University Press, and the other by the University of Chicago.

As you read keep it clear in your notes what is being said about the first book, then the author goes on to the second book, then the third. You can do your summary a book at a time too, otherwise it will get very jumbled up. The article is rather hard to read in parts, but History is rarely pretty.

Again it is a rather long review (which is good for your reading skills and concentration) but also the challenge for you is how to whittle it down into 4-5 decent pages that manages to keep the core ideas while at the same time condensing what you have in front of you.

Please: don’t just cut the digital version down to 4-5 pages, that is not the point of the assignment: I want to see you substantially rewording what is here and using your skills with writing. Please feel free to quote the article but keep it brief , no more than a couple of lines, and then get back to your own writing.

Don’t worry about any citations for the quotes : we all know where they are coming from. You can write it like this:

According to Dabhoiwala, in Virginia , “perhaps 40 percent of all pre-revolutionary inhabitants” were slaves, whereas in the West Indies the proportion was closer to “90 percent.”

Just a note: I do notice when teaching English 1 (and 2!) that people lose track of their own grammar when quoting: so be careful to read it out loud to check. So for example: the following is incorrect, because even though the part of the quote is quoted correctly, the way that you have written the sentence means the grammar is wrong and the sentence is a fragment:

According to Dabhoiwala, “perhaps 40 percent of all pre-revolutionary inhabitants,” whereas in the West Indies, “90 percent.”

As you can see: that sentence is now unreadable.