A COURSE IN DIALOGUE AND NEGOTIATION
Bob,
I am willing to rewrite my proposal, to clarify and rework my project; however, I don’t know where to start. To be honest, I am having trouble with most of your comments and suggestions. Some are unclear and others, I believe, are problematic.
ANALOGY:
I think the most important points, the most elaborate and specific, were those at the end that questioned the analogy I’ve made to First Nations land claims.
I feel that the analogy I offer is stronger than suggested. (Of course, this discrepancy may be because I didn’t articulate it well enough.) I’ve use this link to First Nations land claims because I think it’s tremendously important, particularly in our Vancouver context, while also being keenly relevant to the class and a solid analogy. You stated that:
BC first nations lost everything and have no treaty recognition (though they are getting symbolic recognition). There is no “other BC” for them. There is “another bicycle” for you. Even if your bicycle were to be cut in half you could amalgamate your part with other parts and create a “bicycle”. They can’t do that with BC, even with treaties.
Firstly, as I understand, the Nisga’a, Tsawwassen, and Maa-nulth First Nations made it through the sixth and final stage of the treaty process and have fully signed and implemented treaties; six BC First Nations are in the fifth stage, “Negotiation to Finalize”; and 44 are at stage three, “Negotiation of an Agreement in Principle”. I don’t think this counts as having “no treaty recognition,” and I don’t think the parties involved would refer to this as merely “symbolic” either. But I may be assuming much.
Secondly, if there is “another bike” for me there most certainly is “another BC” for First Nations. As stated in my proposal, the bike in question “was in my family for as long as anyone could remember”. It was also passed on to me from my grandfather, to whom the bike originally and rightly belonged, and I have no other grandfather and he no other bike; hence, there is no “other bike”. Suggesting so is tantamount to saying that the Haida can just go find another island.
Thirdly, BC has been parceled up, just like your cut-up bicycle. This is what reserves are. This is First Nations land claims. This is the treaty process. Land, air, water and the resources therein sectioned off from the rest and given back to First Nations so that they might have their own diminished, different, but functional “whole”.
I simply don’t see where the analogy is so very weak as to be broken and unusable. As I stated in my proposal, there are ample linkages: from an outsider taking control of property that has been in my family for as long as anyone can remember, and doing so without negotiation; to a later dialogue about the matter – the bulk of which the new “owner” spends refusing to accept any responsibility, denies any personal wrongdoing, and won’t help reconcile the issue (despite agreement that the property was wrongfully taken in the first place); to a final process of negotiation about the state of the property going forward. Far from being “conceptually speaking … a weak analogy,” I don’t know that I could make a stronger analogy between two things. The forest being "lungs of the earth" or one’s heart being a pump seem, to me, weaker than the correspondence I’ve drawn between two, yes very different, instances of property theft.
I’m also confused about the stated “semantic fuzziness.” You suggest in your email that I was both verbose and vague, but the comments appended to my paper don’t indicate this.
On page two, you identify semantic issues in several places. Three words are underlined (correspondences, anecdotes, and content) and given question marks above them, as well as suggested replacements. I believe the words I chose are exactly what I intended to say and feel their contexts also explain their use quite clearly. For the first one, correspondences, the whole context reads:
In reviewing the content I have from my personal conflict and negotiation it became obvious that there were significant gaps preventing readers from comprehending the mere data and description of events as a logical and cohesive whole. As such, I’ve begun reviewing the basic source material I have, as well as correspondences between myself and my family and friends regarding the dispute.
While the phrasing could be better, I said “correspondences” and meant just that. It was a more concise, less verbose, way of saying “emails, social media posts, phone calls, text message, and face-to-face conversations.” So I don’t know what to do with this. It could be written better. Here I’m also indicating (though perhaps not well) all the work I’ve done to this point. That I haven’t just sat and thought about it but that I actually have material collected, I’ve been pouring over it, and am actively considering how to bring it together in the best way for the reader.
Similarly, in the middle of page three, circled is my phrase “dialogue-like.” The note asks for me to clarify. But the rest of the sentence does just that. The entire sentence reads, “I will frame the exchange as dialogue-like, for its lack of critical aspects such as “talking without an agenda” and “suspension of judgement.” Again, I’m not sure where to go with this. I haven’t written the paper, and haven’t fleshed out all of the details and all of the ways in which this functions. Yet what I have written is clearly a blueprint and speaks, with some specificity, to the intended content of my pending paper.
In terms of vagueness: In the last sentence of the first page I write, “... I use this question purposefully, to elicit a strong opinion so that I can later engage them in a discussion of relevant local events.” The note there asked from whom I hope to elicit this strong opinion. Only, the preceding sentence reads, “… asking my audience ‘what would you do if you found your own stolen property?’ I use this question purposefully, to elicit a strong opinion...” In my mind it could not be clearer that it is my audience that I hope will have a strong opinion, and perhaps takes sides in the personal, social, and material conflict I’m sharing with them.
Referring to this same section there’s another note from you that asks, “When? You’ll organize this soon?” My understanding is that on November 22nd I will be asked to present my project. And that this presentation and question period is to be thought of as part of our project, used to inform and improve our final project. So, including the person reading and marking it, the project has a clear audience -- one that is clearly specified in our course syllabus.
LENGTH and EFFORT:
Another problem pointed to is the length of my submission. You said it is too short, being "only six pages.” Yet my paper is three sentences from being exactly the target set. We were not given a minimum word count, spacing, or font size, and had I used a different font or increased the font size to 12 point or the spacing to 1.5, I would have been at or over seven pages. Admittedly, though it is my preference, Calibri 10.5 is a little small.
More critically, in my mind we were not asked to give evidence of the time and energy we’ve put into the project (what I imagine really matters), only asked to answer specific questions and provide specific material. Toward my final project I tackled what I saw as the most difficult and important section first: my “case study.” As I’ve written two drafts of my personal story, totaling roughly 5,000 words, I feel like I’ve put forth some effort to date on my project. And yet where does our mid-term allow for showing this work? I did try to demonstrate what I've done in my proposal, in response to item three of our take-home, where I wrote roughly 200 words about this, under the heading “Project Evolution”. Adding more seemed trivial, and attaching to my mid-term the full twelve pages I’ve got was not called for, and on this one item alone would have put me far over the seven page limit. I could have added volume to my paper by adding a section about the questions I planned to ask my potential interviewee. I could have written at length about what I wanted to ask and how this is important to my overall project. It would also have been interesting to discuss what my expectations are, both for the interview itself as well as their responses. This would have been interesting and highly relevant to my project, but was not asked for or even, in my mind, allowed.
There are further excellent reasons for there being “missing” content. Item one of our take-home midterm asked for a 300 word abstract. As I had not yet written a paper I found it challenging to produce a meaningful abstract. For how was I to summarize a paper that doesn’t yet exist? Given this challenge I thought I would check to see if there were any guidelines for writing abstracts from the SFU Writing Centre and other reliable sources. There I found that “an informative abstract answers these questions: Why did you do this study or project? What did you do, and how? What did you find? What do your findings mean?” Further research found that the Purdue Online Writing Lab’s APA Formatting and Style Guide was in agreement, stating: “Your abstract should contain at least your research topic, research questions, participants, methods, results, data analysis, and conclusions. You may also include possible implications of your research and future work you see connected with your findings.” But, of course, I didn’t “find” anything yet, and as a result wasn’t able to tease any meaning from said findings, analyze them, or draw any final conclusions. So, am I right to believe we were being asked to write a partial abstract? I figured this was what was wanted and that I would simply write the what, why, and how of my planned, but not as yet completed, project. But I still needed help. Looking further, specifically into how I should structure the material I had for my abstract, I noticed a recommendation to “emphasize the different points in proportion to the emphasis they receive in the body of the document.” Again, this was something difficult to accomplish without having a completed paper. This was going nowhere, and I just felt more confused than when I started. How was I going to write 300 words about my project without adding a bunch of fluff? Somehow I ended up back at SFU’s Writing and Style Guides, where it’s clear about the precise rules for the length of an abstract. “Abstract length maximums: Master's Thesis: 150 words (one paragraph). Doctorate: 350 words (usually 3 paragraphs).” So it did seem odd that we, a class of undergrads, were being asked to write a publication-worthy abstract, of doctoral length, but with none of the content, in a fraction of the time, for a paper that was not yet written and is not going to ever be published. (Indeed, this was a take-home test!) So, using the above as a guide, I wrote less than 200 words and moved on.
