Photo Album

Photo Album: Civil War

Comments

[Eyma]

Kamal
Awesome job on creating this photo album. I really liked the photos that you used to create your album, and I thought that you did a really good job of writing your captions because they were very descriptive and detailed. For instance, I found it easier to decipher the picture when you stated in the caption "These quarters were one room buildings, so all of these people, two men, two young children, two women and one young baby lived together." I think that there are a couple of things that could you can do to improve your posts. In your album, I found that some of the titles of your photographs were kind of deranged and jumbelled together, for example "Churchscene," whereas it could be "Church Scene" and "Runawayposter," perhaps could be "Runaway Poster." I also found a couple of sentences that could have been structured differently so that they wouldn't be so vague, "Some slaves could physically not run away, did not have the means, or were just too afraid," maybe you could have changed this sentence to "It was difficult for some slaves to run away because of complications or apprehensions that they had." My last suggestion for your post is that you could have made your thesis statement stronger by not directing the reader that you were concluding your paragraph and instead of writing "in short," you could have written your thesis by omitting that and just getting to the point. Overall, I found that you had a very interesting album, you had a captivating topic, but I think that you can improve your post by considering my suggestions.

[Katie Tyler]

Kamal, I really liked your blog! I could tell you spent time in researching your topic and I like that the tone was upbeat and showed a different side of slavery than most people see or know. The different traditions you explained were interesting especially the 'broomstick wedding'. I also thought the picture of the poster was rather funny like you said since most slaves were illiterate. I noticed a few "glitches" in your blog, however. Most errors were grammatical such as this sentence: "When the new slave was brought in to the community of slaves that the owner already had, the new slave had to be taken in by a family". I found this sentence confusing so I felt you could have written this a little clearer. Also, in this sentence, "Once sold the slaves were housed in largely inhospitable conditions to say the least" there should have been a comma after "once sold" and before "to say the least". Lastly, I didn't see any citations or bibliography as to where you found your information and pictures. Other than those minor errors, I really enjoyed your post! GREAT JOB!

[Joe McKay]

Very good post! The way that you described each picture to support your argument was very strong and compelling. I also noticed that in pretty much every one of your narrations you seemed to make a persuasive statement, such as “The interesting thing … lived in one slave quarter” from the picture Slave Quarters. However, you might want to consider revising your thesis. It should be a little more descriptive and a little less ambiguous about its point. Your thesis should clearly state your argument or the focus of your photo essay. In order to do so, you may want to include the “why” and the “how” of your argument or focus: why was slave life part of another culture, and how was this culture so different? Another thing you might consider revising in your essay is the way you narrate some of your pictures. I noticed that some of the narrations did not have a steady relation to your thesis; in other words, you might want to put more effort in tying your descriptions to your thesis, because some of them did not completely relate to it [your thesis]. For example, in Runaway Poster you did not portray how it related to slave life being “part of a whole other culture.” I also observed that you made a few grammatical errors. For instance, in Church Scene, instead of saying, “many slave owners thought to teach the slaves religion,” you should say, “many slave owners sought to teach the slaves religion.” The word ‘thought’ does not show the application of teaching the slaves religion, whereas the word ‘sought’ does. Another instance of opportunity for revision of grammar was in Dance. The section of the sentence that states, “Some slaves could physically not run away” sounds confusing to the reader. Perhaps you could change it to “Some slaves had the physical inability to run away” because it sounds much more clear than the original sentence. Although you made a few errors in your essay, they were only slight, and did not overcome the fact that your argument was very strong and your descriptions were concrete. Great post.

[Andy]

This was a great photo album in general and explained the topic very well. I really liked the introductory paragraph except for the fact that it did use the word slave a good deal. I know that there really aren't many synonyms for the word that do it justice, but using other things helps cut down on redundancy and helps spice it up a little. Also, it seemed like in the description of the runaway slave poster, you had a little trouble coming up with something to write because it seems to restate some of the same information in a way. I'm not sure if that just happened on accident, but it seems like you were kind of trying to fill space so you might want to take a look at that. You might want to look at the first sentence in that entry also because it doesn't seem to look right with all of those commas separating a list which contains long phrases. I've learned that it is possible to use semicolons in some places instead of commas. Lastly, your comment in the dance slide at the very end is a little confusing to me. You said you knew it came from South Carolina or Florida, but never really went past there to explain how you came to that conclusion.