For this assignment, you’ll undertake an original research project on a topic of your choice. The project culminates in an 8-10 page research paper, but getting to that point will be a process. First you’ll select a topic and generate a central research question to be answered by the end of the project. It is essential that the topic allow your voice to shine, whether through primary source analysis, or through analysis of your own data. Through this analysis, you’ll generate your own ideas about the topic. These initial ideas will help you generate keywords and search for scholarly sources using the library’s databases. Not all of the sources you find will be useful, so you’ll undergo a process of evaluating each and restarting your search as needed. For the sources you select, you’ll analyze them, engage them critically, annotate them, and put them into conversation with each other and with your own primary research.
You are required to meaningfully use four scholarly, secondary sources. Meaningfully, in this case, means that the source should inform the argument or analysis of the paper, should help shape the paper’s ideas, beyond providing a simple fact or two.
The best writing often begins as a response to what others have said, so imagine your project as initiating a conversation on a particular topic. You’ll respond to the claims or findings of your sources, then bring in other voices to compliment & complicate your ideas. Or your sources may be useful for providing a lens through which you can examine patterns produced in your own data collection.
In this paper, you will need to go beyond simply reporting what others have said. Your argument (or findings) should be unique and defensible. The paper should be more than a simple regurgitation or someone else’s claim or summary of what others have already said. Because it can be difficult to establish your authority in relation to what established authors & researchers have produced, you will need to select a topic that allows your own voice to speak loudest in the paper (whether through analysis of a primary text, or through collecting data on an original research question). Above all, the paper must be researching a topic in which your voice can shine, where your argument and analysis is the most important element of the essay. In the end, the paper must be thesis driven, or findings driven, depending on the kind of topic you select.
Use MLA-style parenthetical citation for this essay and include a works cited page. Take very careful notes along the way in order to distinguish where ideas/quotes came from and which are your own in order to avoid violations of academic integrity. All words & ideas that are not your own must be cited appropriately.
