Peer Critique

Robin Piach

Professor Sony Coráñez Bolton

ENGL 121

31 March 2015

Peer Critique

Ms. Clotter’s wrote her summary on “Imagined Communities” by Benedict Anderson.  The opening sentence to her summary is “Many things we would thought we knew how to define because it is a term we learned in 6th grade. But how well can we know that term?”  I found this opening to be a bit confusing, because the term itself is not stated.   Further on in the paper Ms. Clotter refers to the term “nationalism” several times; from this I can assume that the term she is referring to in paragraph one is “nationalism”.   I feel if the topic was more clearly stated at the beginning of the paper, and clearly stating what the author’s argument is, the reader will have an easier time understanding Ms. Clotter’s summary of Anderson’s “Imagined Communities”, and her interpretation of the book, and the point that Anderson is trying to make.

Ms. Clotter does a nice job of breaking up and directing the flow of her summary by using the names of the section titles “section Concepts and Definition page six” (¶ 3).  The summary itself touches on various aspects as to what nationalism can be, and what nationalism is made up of.  

I believe that Ms. Clotter has a good general understanding of the book “Imagined Communities” by Benedict Anderson. Her summary has some nice transitions for example at the end of paragraph five she states “However, we had no choice to chose what we could be born into. That leads to the religion segment.”. This transition finishes the idea that the current section is referring to and introduces that the next section will pertain to religion and how it is related to the makeup of nationalism.

Ms. Clotter’s essay had a good overall feel to it. The essay needs a more pronounced statement of the argument that Anderson is trying to make. I understand that this is a rough draft, however there were a fair amount of grammatical, spelling and word choice errors that made the essay a bit difficult to read and fully understand.  Some examples of this are as follows: In paragraph three “is that background Of being Hispanic, African American, Coregation, ect.”  I am unsure what she means by “Coregation”. Also, the O in “Of” should be lowercase, along with the O in “Of” in the title of her essay.  One other sentence I had a hard time understanding was in paragraph one “If I asked you to tell men hat nationalism means can you tell me off the back of your head what does it actually mean?”, I am confused by the wording of this statement in general, but I feel that concept of the statement is essential to the summary itself.

I am interested in reading Ms. Clotter’s final draft of her summary, along with the application portion of this project.