How Carney Chose To Use Her Sources.

For many centuries, it has been believed that Portuguese are responsible for bringing indigenous species and Asian technology of rice to South Carolina. However, in the article “African Rice in the Columbian Exchange”, Judith E. Carney tries to revise that well-known belief and argues that there were African varieties and African technologies of rice responsible for the creation of agriculture in South Carolina. In order to prove her point, she has to first show that Africans first had their own riziculture in West Africa prior to any contact with Asian varieties or Europeans with buying slaves. Carney also has to make a reasonable account as to how African rice gets to the new Americas. She incorporates a wide range of sources to both defend and go against her positions but there is no one document that specifically states that Africans brought rice to the new Americas. While Carney, in fact, does have some sources that effectively support her position, her overall usage of sources is inadequate in supporting her theory that Africans were the first to being rice to South Carolina.

In order to make it clear that there was a pattern on the movement of agricultural across the Atlantic, she references P. Collionson’s  “Of The Introduction Of Rice And Tar In Our Colonies”. She uses this to back up her claim that was, in the 1690s, already been established shipments of not only slaves but rice coming over from West Africa. Carney is saying that it suggests that it came from West Africa. What’s contingent on it not being Asian rice is time. But where did Carney get this information from? This is an inferior source that does not help her source. The inconsistent comes in to play with the title of the writing piece. The writing isn’t even from an article or archive or a data set, it from a Gentleman Magazine. As so it from the 1760s. They are talking about an order of rice that came there seventy years before this was published. This person probably wasn’t even alive. And also this a now secondary because it is seventy-year detached from what it’s actually documenting. The author fails to give readers an explanation as to where these records came from, leaving them wondering how the Collinson got this information from.

An additional source that Carney attempts to utilize to defend on her stance is Orlando Ribeiro’s  “Aspectos e Problemas da Expansdo Portuguisa”, which is a secondary source. The purpose of her including Rieriro in her article is for him to stand the bias of all the historians. The source lists goods that were exchanged from different countries then goes on to state that Africa had not to exchange any useful goods. But in doing so, Carney is unsuccessful in supporting her claim. Yes, Africa did not supply any useful goods but that does not support her argument Africa did bring the methods of making rice to South Carolina. Another reason Carney doesn’t effectively use this source is the contractionary information. In another document Carney uses, Valentim Fernandes,” Description de la C6te occidentale d’Afrique, trans” it states that the Portuguese had set up the rice before the 1500s and Riberiros states that in the cargo list rice was listed before 1513 through 1515. This information suggests that the Portuguese introduced their rice techniques to the Africans. Carney wants to prove that Africans brought their own technique of rice to South Carolina. These statements go against Carney’s theory.

With those two sources that Carney, she fails to effectively defend her position that African varieties and African technologies of rice were responsible for the creation of agriculture in South Carolina. Perhaps if Carney could have provided a brief statement as to how P. Collionson received his information, the source could have been used successfully to support her argument. Carney’s second source also unsuccessfully supports her claim by not building up her side of the arguments, it only suggested that African slaves brought nothing that was useful. Carney’s overall use of her sources was ineffective and supporting her theory.

Self Reflective Essay

While writing this exploratory essay, there was a number of things that I took into consideration and steps I took for me to create this essay. An exploratory essay is solely focused on the sources that the author uses to defend his/her argument then evaluating those sources to be either successful or not successful. In my essay, I argued that Carney’s use of her sources was poor to defend her position. I went about this by introducing the source, then explain how Carney intended to use the source, then analyzed how she was ineffective in using that source to defend her argument. My audience was not only my peers and my professors but for people in the everyday world. People who do any kind of research or even everyday reading. People will always present the best version of themselves to others but it’s up to an individual to decide if that person is truly authentic. The same concept applies with this essay, which is this motivation of this essay. Carney, or any author writing a scholarly article, present their argument in a way that makes the reader want to believe what they’re saying to be true. We, as readers have to evaluate the article and its sources to be authentic enough in order to believe what the author says. The purpose of this essay was to give the audience an example of how to decide if a source is credible or not and its effectiveness in building the author’s argument.

To be able to write a well-written essay, you first have to do a thorough reading of the article to get an understanding of how the author uses the sources. I believe if I would have read the article thoroughly and analyzed it more, I would have been able to produce a better essay. Before writing, I wrote a very general outline that helped me understand how to structure my essay but I didn’t help me to build content. So I struggled with referencing the source and paraphrasing what the source had to say. Later on, I got some clarification and revised that section of the essay. While drafting my essay, I structured it according to my outline. I also didn’t read my work out loud to see if it made sense or not. Editing and proofreading were not a challenge though  I had to go back and fix my sentences to make them more understandable. I tried a variety of sentences but that made my essay sound informal and confusing. I changed these sentences to simple sentences to help the reader understand what I was trying to explain to them. I believe my essay was well organized and I used the MLA format to cite the sources however, I did not have works cited page. Overall this essay was not my best being that I struggled a lot with the content. I learned that in this course every writing assignment we do will prepare us for the next writing assignment. This exploratory essay will prepare us for the research paper where we have to evaluate sources to be credible enough to be in our own paper.

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