I have reviewed your draft paper and attached it with numerous comments and recommendations embedded in the text using Word’s Review function.

Please review my comments and recommendations, as well as the recommendations I forwarded previously, and incorporate them into the paper. The paper requires a great deal of work.

As I noted previously, and as I have consistently noted throughout this course and other HSTI courses you have taken with me, every assertion of fact in an academic paper requires supporting evidence in the form of data or citation of an academically credible source. The more specific and detailed your assertion of fact, the greater the need for a specific research citation, including the page number where that evidence can be found. Throughout the draft paper you’ve made such assertions or statements of fact but have not offered any evidence for them. Assertions and statements that are not supported by evidence in the form of data or citation of an academically credible source are not facts – they are, at best, opinions, and statements of opinion are not relevant in academic research papers.

If you make a claim, a statement, or an assertion and do not provide some evidence to support it, that claim, statement or assertion is irrelevant and invalid and your reader if free to ignore it.

Also with regard to providing evidence and citing sources, you need to be exceptionally careful about the sources you cite. Some of the sources you cite (for example, ten-year-old articles from foreign newspapers, including a newspaper that is essentially a supermarket tabloid) are just not credible academic sources.

More importantly, if you cite a source as evidence for an assertion you’ve made, that fact or assertion must actually be confirmed by that source. In other words, if you make a statement and claim that the evidence for that statement comes from a particular article or book, when in fact that article or book does not provide that evidence, you are making a false statement. That is, you are lying. This is a violation of the norms of academic integrity (the norms you have affirmed that you understood and would follow) and such lies are tantamount to plagiarism.

As I have recommended previously, avoid using ‘big words’ and complex sentence structures. Frankly, you often use vocabulary improperly, and that detracts from the value and credibility of your work. Similarly, complex sentence structures can often be misinterpreted or misunderstood, or simply lack enough clarity to make sense to the reader. Use short and simple declarative sentences without flourishes.

Again, please review the attached draft paper with my comments and recommendations, and please review the comments and recommendations provided in this email and in previous emails, and amend the draft paper accordingly.