Overview:
You should see your capstone project as a work in progress (see attached draft). Always allow yourself room for adjustments and modifications of your own position. Last term we identified our interests, chose a topic, put together a research plan, refined our topic to a position (thesis), did a considerable amount of research to inform ourselves about our topic and documented the extent of our research in a review of literature. That is a substantial amount of work, and the process was designed to set you up for success in the drafting phase of the project.
This first assignment is designed to reassess your thesis and to begin to arrange your thoughts. Remember that a successful paper will be a paper that is committed to and focused on the development of the thesis. Everything you write should serve the thesis. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t belong, or it needs to be rethought as to how it can be made to serve the thesis.
Part I: Reassessment section
Restate your thesis. Do not provide background. Do not provide commentary. State your position in a clear, defensible, declarative statement that will be the focus of all your efforts from here on out. It may have changed somewhat since you initially stated it a few weeks ago. This is a good time to reassess that point of view, and it is your opportunity to strengthen it based on how you’ve grown in your thoughts in the intervening weeks of research. Your thesis statement should be only one (1) sentence!
Purpose statement. Draft a paragraph of not more than 200 words that explains what you now want to accomplish with this thesis.
Part II: Organizational Outline section
Now that you are refocused and are committed to your thesis, it’s time to begin to “arrange” your ideas. This is a rhetorically technical term that ultimately refers to about 80% of the drafting process to come. But to get this kicked off, I need you to think about your own ideas. All the things you want to say in your paper—not the things that other people have said, but what you think you have to say to develop your thesis.
Start with a brainstorming session and simply write down all the ideas that you think are supportive of your thesis. Attempt to state the ideas in a way that you stated your thesis, i.e. as a single declarative sentence. After you have a good collection, start to evaluate the ideas. How strong is each? What do they contribute to the thesis? What are their logical connections to the other ideas? Once you have evaluated the ideas individually, begin to “arrange” the ideas into a logical, persuasive sequence.
Submit a “working” or draft outline in full-sentence form (as opposed to key words) that represent the reasons that will serve as a starting point for drafting.
