Ryan Melosini

Brendan J. Wright
Draft Response: Joy Hii
Dear Joy,
Nice job on your D2! I thought that you had a really good paper overall and I think you
definitely have a solid foundation to start with. I think that your paper is definitely about what
you say it is about: that Indian Secularism is a good form of secularism and that its only flaw
is its conception of principled distance. I happen to agree with you that principled distance
can sometimes discriminate both majorities and minorities within a country so I definitely
think that this is a strong thesis. However, you do not really offer a solution to the problem
that you bring up and I think that if you were to find a solution and support it in your essay,
your essay would really be complete. Overall, however, I think you have a thesis that you can
work with to make a great R2.
Your draft’s strengths’ lie in its initial analysis of principled distance and how it can create
differential treatment. This is a strong point and definitely needs to be elaborated on. You
also smartly point out how the idea of principled distance would seem to work well in an
ideal society, but its implementation in reality undermines its own logic.
Some counter-arguments that could be made to your argument is that sometimes, differential
treatment may not be such a bad idea since different religions have different practices and,
eventually, the specific differential treatments of each religion will balance out if a
government is just and fair in creating provisions for different religions. As I said before
however, I do agree with your main point in that the idea of principled distance must be
rethought if it is to be applied universally.
Two elements that you may want to rethink in your revision are your analysis in the latter
half of your paper and also your structure. While your analysis of principled distance is good,
the analysis that comes after this reads more like a summary of all the different sources.
Rather than analyze each source and take out evidence that will support your claim, you tend
to just summarize the source and move on. You should definitely take some more time to
close read these sources so that you can use them more effectively to support or extend your
argument. When it comes to structure, it does not seem like your paper builds upon itself. In,
rather, feels like a loose connection of points. You should try to reorganize your thinking or
perhaps plan out your argument more logically so that your paper flows better. In addition,
you should try to use transitions in order to connect your paragraphs together.
With regards to your questions, I definitely think that you have a good understanding of the
sources, but what you need to do is to look at them more closely. Right now, you are
somewhat stating the obvious when you need to be analyzing more closely. Also, I think that
you may be overusing quotations simply because you are not fully analyzing each quotation.
You would be fine using this large amount of quotations if you analyzed all of them. All in
all though, nice job!
Sincerely,
Ryan