Today’s Plan:
- Attendance
- Topic Proposal Paper
- Working Knowledge Presentations
- Homework
Topic Proposal Paper
Now that you have completed the Topic Exploration assignment, it is time to develop your ideas a bit more. In a 750-1,200 word essay, present your opinion on a focused issue or controversy within your chosen topic, and discuss your purpose for research, your proposed audience, and your research plan.
We are going to follow USC’s Proposal Guide to organize our proposals. According to the USC site, proposals have:
- Introduction (what problem will you address? why is it important?)
- Background and Significance (a more extensive history of the project, extends the introduction)
- Literature Review (What research have you already done?)
- For the proposal, this should be a minimum of five sources or 125 pages
- Additionally, the proposal should include the next four sources you need to read. These will be four sources in your Annotated Bibliography
- Research Design and Methods (What will you do? How?)
- I will discuss this more on Tuesday, but you should be thinking about what you might *do* beyond reading sources. Can you conduct interviews with local experts? Can you examine local policies? Can you conduct a survey? Can you visit a site and document important stuff? Can you watch 10 episodes of the news in order to track something? Can you etc etc etc.
- Hypothesis / Preliminary Conclusions / Conclusion
Your papers, then, should be in either MLA or APA format and include these headings.
These papers require a Works Cited or Reference Page.
These papers are due Thursday, February 9th.
Homework
Read Chapter 19, “Evaluating Sources.” We will work on evaluating and summarizing sources in Tuesday’s class.
I will be grading the Topic Exploration papers Friday and Saturday. I will have all papers finished by Saturday evening. You can get started on the proposal paper before you get my feedback by locating more sources. By the time you finish the Topic Proposal, you should already have read and summarized 5 sources dealing with your topic and have a list of the next 6 sources you are going to read.
Of course, we want these sources to be useful and relevant–so try using the library’s key word searches or using Google Scholar to find sources that cite the ones you have already used. Don’t be afraid to swing by office hours on Tuesday (11-12) or to make an appointment for Monday (I will be on campus Monday from 9:30am to about 3:00). Finally, you can always go to the library and ask a research librarian for help locating sources!
