Sigaba

IMO, program A sounds like a better choice overall than program B. If one were to draw a series of concentric circles with you in the innermost circle and your community as the outermost circle and then chart the benefits of each program, I think one would find that program A's benefits are much closer to the inner circles and B's benefits align closer to the outer circles. Conversely, the drawbacks of program A would fall into the outer circles while program B's appear to fall into the inner circles. A question: Are you 100% certain that if you go to program B that you won't have to start over even though you will already have a master's? And by 100%, I mean a signed document?

Probably not. If you want a doctorate in politics, your dissertation committee will want you to demonstrate that you can create knowledge in political science. You may be able to arrange for a historian to sit on your committee but she will likely defer to what your committee chair recommends. I recommend that you look at the listings for jobs where you would want to work as well as at the background of established professionals. I think you will see a pattern rather quickly.

I do not recommend using this tactic. Applicants to graduate programs are not professors' managers and, therefore, should not address professors as if they're subordinates.

I am going to disagree with this post slightly. I do agree that when asking for support, one is best served when one can be specific. I also think that there may be opportunities to build rapport and to get different support if one can show enough trust to say, "I need help." Those three words can subtly communicate the need for support above/beyond the needed technical guidance to include the need for a professionally appropriate amount of emotional and psychological support. YMMV.

I highly recommend that you write this email concisely and include the most efficient summary of your scholarly interests that you can.

You might address this concern by reading master's theses that have been previously approved. Pie in the sky, you'll be able to find examples produced in your department and/or addressing the same subject and/or using a similar methodology. I believe that if you spend a few hours doing this kind of background research you'll find out what I suspect: you're doing just fine. Right now, your greatest opponent is your fear of failure, not your ability to work hard, not your ability to think things through. What would you do if you weren't afraid of failing?

Have you had any luck searching for answers to these questions on jstor and other academic data bases or Google?

I think that you are alienating this professor (if you've not already done so) by attempting to micromanage her. I think that if your tone in the OP reflects the way you are thinking when you communicate with her, she's receiving from you a message that is contrary to your best interests. Can you think of ways to dial down the frequency and intensity of your communications with all of those who are doing you a courtesy by writing you LORs? (FWIW, I once overdid it sending reminders to a professor. The next time he saw me, I grinned sheepishly and apologized. He glared.)

I recommend against using any writing tactic that does not reflect authentically who you are, what you want to do, and why you want to do it.

When considering @MarineBluePsy 's guidance, please keep in mind that relationships can change over time. Professor Xavier and Professor Eisenhardt can be friends today, mortal enemies tomorrow, and looking to graduate students to choose sides.

Were I in your situation I would look for existing master's theses and doctoral dissertations in PA, IR, and political science that use a similar methodology. Pie in the sky, some theses address your topic/area as well, but you may have to settle for apples to bananas. If I may, I would recommend that you revisit the conclusion that the "how to write a thesis" class was "basically worthless" because the instructor's interests and approach differ from yours. If you look through your notes and your memories of the class, was there any discussion of skills like time management, maintaining confidence, proofreading, and so forth?

Prepare two agendas for a brief check-in meeting (no more than 30 minutes). The first agenda could provide a broad brush outline of the questions/topics you'd like to discuss in the meeting as a handful of bullet points. The second agenda, which you'll keep to yourself at first, develops each of the bullet points into summary/talking points/questions. It would not hurt if you were to run both agendas past a fellow student in your field as well an interested and sophisticated listener/reader. If either cannot "read back" to you accurately the first agenda, you have more work to do. (The readback should sound something like "You are preparing a research project on X topic to answer question A. You wish to have a meeting with your advisor to gain clarity on Issues 1-5.) When you've got both agendas squared away, communicate with your professor that you'd like to arrange a project status meeting. You can phrase the need for the meeting as you see fit. Ranging from a confident "I am pretty sure I am on the right path, but I thought it would be best to double check with you" to a very candid request for a flotation device ("Glub, glub, glub...") I would recommend a middle ground in which you explicitly say "I need help--your help." The key here is that before you ask for this additional support, make darn sure that you've gone as far as you can go on your own...and a couple of steps more. You want to avoid a situation in which you're asking where your glasses are when you're holding them in your hands. You want to create a situation in which it's abundantly clear that you've done your due diligence so that when she indicates the next steps to take, you nod as if to say "I thought so..." Please keep in mind that there's a distinct possibility that you're doing much better than you think AND you're making mistakes AND missing something obvious. Please understand that if you can find a way to say "I need help; I need YOUR help," this exercise is a win.

https://www.walkscore.com/

Bluntly, I think that you should start over from scratch. As written, the one point of the statement appears to be that you want to study the impact of "new technology" on the interpretation of American modernists. Would it be possible to do more with that point (if that's what you want to do)? Does English literature have generally accepted definitions for "new technology," modernists, and modernism that you do not need to elaborate on what you mean when you use those terms? As written, I don't think that the discussion of your coursework and the "high marks" you received adds value. Is it possible to write about your undergraduate education so that it makes a supporting point more efficiently? Just as an example, in one of my statements of purpose, I provided the percentage of all classes across multiple departments I took related to the Cold War as an indication of my commitment to that topic. If your coursework can tell a story about your interest in new technology and American modernists and modernism, you might benefit from making that point. A general comment, I strongly urge you to find ways to write more efficiently by using different verbal constructions. "I used to practice shooting jump shots at the gym in the morning" is not as efficient as "I practiced my jump shot daily."

I'll take it a step further. The only sure way to know if a program is a good fit is by attending and seeing what happens when you need more support than you realize and/or screw up the second and third time, and/or SHTF due to circumstances beyond your control.

A generally accepted practice is not always the same as a best practice. My concern would be that members of an admission committee who were familiar with a LOR writer's boilerplate were doing a double take and asking each other "Did we read this letter last year? Or the year before?...Next!" IMO, it's not just about professors being "busy people," it's about some professors being stuck in NGAF mode.

Who advised you to apply to safety schools? Students, staff members, or professors? Just to offer a contrasting POV. I used the same tactics when I applied to college and the two times I applied to graduate school. (I "transferred.") In each case, I applied to institutions that I knew would admit me. The end tally was 100%, 50%, and 50%. A second contrasting opinion. If you want to get into a phd program, apply to at least one. Do not self-select yourself out of the process because you think you're not ready. (Because who is?) Let the admissions committees decide if you belong or not. My $0.02.

All that matters is the sample that you're writing. You are competing only against your own potential and the time you have left. Do not worry about what anyone else has or hasn't done with ten pages. Seriously, think to yourself " I'm going to kick their asses." And proceed to do just that.

You have plenty of time if you put together a reasonable game plan. Budget the next day to doing additional research and taking notes. Use Jstor to find secondary works on slave revolts. Go to a library and make some good decisions and lucky guesses on which published secondary works. Jot down ideas that will help you flesh out your argument. Using the writing tactics that are comfortable, flesh out your essay on days two and three. Walk away from it on day four. Work on other aspects of your applications on this day. The one and only one thing that you might do for your piece is to decide upon a title. Proofread for clarity on day five in the morning. Make revisions in the afternoon/evening of day five. After finishing your revisions, proof your citations to make sure they're up to speed. Final scrub for typing errors and grammatical mistakes on day six. For this scrub, try reading the essay backwards, word by word, punctuation mark by punctuation mark. If you've not already done so, try your best to identify the historiographical debate your piece addresses. What are the competing scholarly viewpoints on slave rebellions? What kinds of evidence do historians marshall to make their arguments? How do your primary source materials help to confirm or correct any of the competing views? Does the study of slave rebellion have relevance today? Along the way, make sure that you define your terms and establish your boundaries. Why rebellion and not revolt? Which rebellions are you discussing and why? If you're using specific rebellions to make broader generalizations, say so. If broader generalizations about slave rebellions do not match up to the rebellions you're discussing, say why they don't. Whatever you do, make sure that you get enough to eat and enough to sleep. Make sure you do what you can to take care of yourself emotionally. Make sure that you save your essay often with a backup copy on a cloud. Or two. Yes, the next week is going to be a bit of a grind, maybe even the most significant challenge you've faced yet as a historian. Focus on doing the best that you can under the circumstances. If you come away from the experience knowing that you did the best you could under the circumstances, you've done well.

IME/IMO, yes. Academic historians frown on the use of encyclopedias even though some contribute and edit them. Is there any way that you can "reverse engineer" the citations and find the primary source material in a less controversial format?

Less difficult ≠ easy. ? Pain, pain, and more pain. But the word limit establishes a boundary. IRT the WS, a potentially efficient approach is to focus on its critical portions: the citations, the introduction, the summary/discussion of historiography, a couple of key sections, key transitional paragraphs, the conclusion. Then, if time permits, focus on polishing the first sentence or two of every paragraph, and a dedicated effort to identity and to eliminate awkward phrases and sentences. A recommendation. If you know for a fact that you're applying to a program in which the WS is given extra attention, do what you can to know your audience so that you can make a handful of adjustments. This is not to suggest that you should pander to potential readers. I am suggesting that if you can easily find out that Professor Xavier has a pet peeve and that peeve is run-on sentences that go on and on for a considerable amount of time that you go through your WS and make the appropriate edits.

It's impossible to say for certain. A professor who was on the admissions committee didn't read mine until the following year. MOO, one's generally better off investing more time in the SOP than the WS because it's less difficult to write your best 500 - 2000 words than your best 18,000.

The vagaries of project managers.

It is highly unlikely that you have a "completely original" research idea, even if you're sitting on a lockbox filled with the letters and papers that no one has seen in ages. It is more likely that you're not familiar enough with the historiography to know how your research will contribute to existing debates innovatively. IRT the word limit and the phrasing, the workaround is to use the names of established scholars as reference points. I recommend that you take a look at the featured pieces in several volumes of the American Historical Review. You should encounter numerous examples in which academics summarize complex debates mostly (if not exclusively) by listing names.

Do not present others' work as your own. For guidance, please see the following. https://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/statements-standards-and-guidelines-of-the-discipline/statement-on-standards-of-professional-conduct#Plagiarism http://www.oah.org/about/reports/reports-statements/professional-integrity-and-the-oah/ The position that plagiarism is "fine" as long as it is not "egregious" is not sustainable.