Talk:The Debates of the Hundred Philosophical Schools

Sorry, Mitchel, this doesn't look like a mid-term paper. I am the greatest 18:47, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Mitchel, I was very impressed with your presentation and it inspired me to try even harder on making sure I was adequately prepared to teach my own. Great Job Cia1819 08:22, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

An article would have been nice to read, perhaps with the PowerPoint link at the end. Dekeo 20:40, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Dear Mitchell,

• I can see from your paper that you really tried hard to get the main points mentioned. Of course the topic was a little bit broader than the one's of your peers and it might have been difficult to do this paper in the middle of the semester instead of in the end.

To me it looks like that you had several difficulties:

• technical difficulties to create the article and to post images. So I helped you to copy and paste the Word file into it and structure it with headers and subheaders. I also moved the page according to the title you gave it.
• the argumentation leaves a lot of things open to the reader, e.g. it would have been essential to explain in the beginning why a period of civil war or war among small kingdoms was at the same time a period of cultural flourishing and the competition of 100 schools (possible answers: longing for stability, peace coming by unity; competition of intellectuals to persuade the kings in order to change history to the better etc.)
• the time frame is quite clear, it is also indicated on the main course page, so you could have referred to it
• the summing up of the different main schools does not always grab their essence. We also had a lot of discussion in class to compare the different schools, so I do not know why you did not reflect more of our discussions in your summaries of the school
• Overall I see that you tried hard, however, from your presentations and discussion contributions in class I know that you can do even better, when you spend some more time and efforts on it next time, i.e. in the final paper. Root 10:05, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Nice to see the actual article. The grammar, and some of the writing seems a little awkward though. I made some editing changes in the first paragraph to give you an idea of how you might have worded it to "flow" a little easier. Don't give up! Have a little more courage in your own writing style; don't worry so much about saying exactly what your sources say. It is OK to paraphrase (to say what the source did but in you own words)- it's kind of like what you say in your presentations. Try reading the article out loud. That is one way to catch these awkward spots before anyone else sees them (if it doesn't sound right when you read it, or it feels awkward to read, it is probably not written right either). Good work! Dekeo 20:00, 31 October 2012 (UTC)