What's been happening

Obviously it's been a long time since I have blogged, but I have quite a few drafts to fill in these blanks, with red pen all over them.

At the moment I am pretty much at the finished point, I just have to do a few more things:

1. Discuss the reliability of the Irving's Dresden death toll source.
2. Do the source analysis (internet theory essay, Evan's book, Irving's email)
3. Do the big bibliography list

Self-assessment

To this point I am fairly happy with my progress. My final project has come together well, I feel like I have established a clear argument. However, this was not without difficulty. Some challenges I faced were:

1. Choosing which passages from Irving's website to use: I initially wanted to only due Dresden, partly because Evans has a succinct little section on Irving and the Dresden death toll and partly because I found the passage I was going to use for that very early on. However, Mr Wright suggested that this wasn't comprehensive enough. So I also did the Auschwitz death camp passage, as he has received alot of public coverage for his stance on this issue. I had to be careful because I did not want to employ a selection criteria that intentially made Irving look bad, like passages were he just does a big rant on the Zionist agenda. So I chose passages were Irving was recording his historical findings, in the public domain, which mimicked real history but on closer analysis were very flawed.

2. Trying to make big points clear: My natural writing style is filled with long sentences and commas, so when I was writing my essay I struggled to make the big points about Irving's historical inquiry clear enough. There isn't really much more to say on this, but I (with the help of Mr Wright) really cut down my sentence size to emphasise the main points of my project.

3. Comparison of Irving's Dresden stats with another source: One issue I definitely faced was the need to compare Irving's Dresden death toll stats to a verified source. I combated this by, with the help of Mr Wright and Jake, finding some verified stats from historians, developed from cited traces. This way I wasn't just saying that Irving's death toll count was wildly exaggerated, but I was proving it.

Will post my source analysis' later tonight.