Research Essay

Description

You’ve worked on your ability to understand and interpret academic texts. You’ve developed your own line of academic inquiry, researched it, refined it, and developed it into your own arguments and ideas supported by sources. Now we’re putting it all together.   At this point—after the Project Proposal and Annotated Bib—you should be able to provide a pretty detailed account of where you’re taking this paper. Make sure you have a clear thesis statement and that this thesis statement is making an argument. You’re taking a stand on something. Be ambitious. Don’t argue something unnecessary, redundant, or obvious (“People are different around the world.” “America is a diverse place.”). Go for the new (“The Seattle of 2050 will look different in surprising ways.” “Ethiopian politics are fundamentally reshaping how Ethiopians envision their future.” “While largely invisible, support organizations for the elderly are vital to community health in rural areas of Japan.”) These aren’t perfect examples, but they illustrate the kind of ambitious and surprising thinking and arguing your thesis should convey.   Create an outline. This will help you understand how your ideas stack and build on each other, where your sources fit in to support your arguments, and how you’ll arrange the parts of your paper to build toward an ending. Not outlining could lead to an unorganized blob of text. We’ll work on this in class. With a paper of this size, outlining is an absolutely crucial step. Even if you’ve never outlined a paper before, do it now. The outline will be due by 11:59 PM on March 7.   When you have your outline, begin writing. Keep writing. The length of this may be intimidating, but if you’ve chosen your topic carefully, done your research, put thought into your proposal, and carefully crafted your outline, this should be the easiest part of the assignment.   Your paper must include a minimum of eight sources. At least three of those must be from peer-reviewed, scholarly articles. If you’ve put work into the Annotated Bibliography, this should be very easy. Make sure your sources are used in such a way that they are adding to the argument and not simply being used for the sake of being used.   Your essays together should be 2200-2500 words (not including the Works Cited page), 12 pt. font, Times New Roman, double-spaced with standard one-inch margins. Please upload the file (doc, docx, or rtf) to the appropriate dropbox by 11:59 PM on March 17. Then go celebrate (after completing the Final Reflection and Extra Credit option).