Guidelines on Writing the Individual Paper
Word Count: 2,500
Here are some general guidelines about writing the individual paper:
1. The starting point is to choose a topic in which you are interested. This is the key. Interest will drive you to study the topic carefullyshould choose a particular topic if you consider the following three rules:
a. Any topic related to punishment or penal policy/penal institution/penal practice in Hong Kong, an overseas jurisdiction, or from a comparative perspective is acceptable. Try to look around yourself to see if anything is relevant, or try to go through the lecture handouts to see if there is anything interesting there.
b. Don’t be too ambitious. Always ask yourself whether you can handle a particular topic within 2,500 words. For example, if you would like to choose death penalty in the US, I am afraid your paper of 2,500 words will be very superficial. So remember to start with something small and dig further. For example, in the past students examined the diet options available in Hong Kong prisons and tried to understand the rationality of providing multiple diet options for the prisoners/inmates. You may also investigate how the CSD protects prisoners’ voting rights after a law gives prisoners the right to vote or how the CSD in HK treats male prisoners’ haircuts when they lost in a final appeal at the Court of Final Appeal in HK.
c. Avoid choosing a popular topic unless you have something very new to say. Why? It is because you will have lots of previous studies to digest and then you will be at a loss what to cover in your paper. Certainly, here I don’t mean that you should choose something outrageously remote to punishment or penal policies.
I would like to stress here that the process of choosing a suitable topic is itself a learning process. You should make good use of this process to “sharpen your eyes”, i.e. to be sensitive to any research topics. It is not easy, but it is very fruitful. So, don’t complain.
2. After you’ve decided the topic, you should try to collect materials, including journal articles, books, book chapters, research reports, etc. Before you write, you should have a thorough understanding of the topic you have chosen. Please note that this process doesn’t allow shortcuts. You have to spend the time to go through the readings. For example, most often it is worthwhile for you to understand the background of the chosen topic. For example, in the 1980s the power of reviewing death penalty cases was delegated to the Higher People’s Court at the provincial level during the first national Strike-Hard campaign, but in 2007 it was returned to the SPC. This background information is important for you to set your research question on the effects of such a policy change.
3. Make an outline of your paper
The outline is similar to a road map and helps you organize the readings into logically coherent parts. It is the skeleton of your whole paper. There are various ways to make an outline. The general steps may include the following:
· Give the introduction about the paper and what kind of materials you have used for the study;
· Set the background or theme;
· Write the main idea of each paragraph;
· List the questions that you are yet to answer;
4. In your paper you may have four sections:
a. Introduction
This is the place for you to explain why you are interested in this particular topic, or why this topic is so compelling for us. Also explain in detail what aspects of the topic you are going to cover. Here you can try to narrow down to certain ‘manageable’ aspects of the topic. For example, restorative justice is a very broad topic, and you can write several books on it. You may only look at how people in Chinese societies view the rationale of restorative justice based on previous survey studies. This line of enquiry is important because we should have a certain level of public support towards the restoral justice model before we try to implement it in our society.
In this part you may also explain what resources you have used to investigate the particular topic.
b. Main arguments
This is the place for to organize your readings logically. You may cut the topic into several small aspects and explain the aspects one by one.
c. Discussion and conclusion
This is for you to discuss the implications of your enquiry, e.g. contributions to theories and practices, or to point the way forward, e.g. what should be done further in order to improve the current situation.
d. References (every paper should include this section).
You may use any referencing style, e.g. APA, MLA, etc. But it is important that you use one style consistently.
