Overview
This course includes a project and paper on a topic of your choice. This project has four parts:
1. Topic Choice: Choosing and describing your topic
2. Annotated Bibliography: Find scholarly sources for your project and briefly summarize them.
3. Final Paper: about 5-7 pages, typed, double-spaced, following APA format.
This project intends to give a more in-depth opportunity for you to study a topic in mythology and culture you are interested in, as well as to practice researching that topic, working with different sources, and communicating your learning and analysis.
Topic Choice
At this stage, you will pick a topic for your paper and briefly explain it. The topic must be related to the course subject matter. It should deal with mythology and/or how narratives are related to or shape culture. There is considerable latitude in choosing a culture and/or mythology to work with. You can choose a modern culture, or an ancient one, for example, and you can choose any world culture or mythology. However, you must make sure you find reliable information to use for your topic, and you must get your topic okayed by the instructor.
You must choose one of the following approaches to this project.
You can:
. Interview someone
. Observe a holiday, ritual, or worship service
. Analyze a work of art or literature
. Analyze a particular myth or religious story
Each of these is described further below.
Analyze a myth or religious story: For this option you can choose to read and interpret a myth or religious story. In your Topic Choice identify a good primary source to use for the story in question. In your Final Paper consider the context of the story or myth, what it means, and how it has been interpreted by at least one culture or religious community in history.
Use your secondary sources (from the Annotated Bibliography) to explain the context of the story, as well as to understand, analyze, and interpret it.
Submission
In your Topic Choice submission identify the following for your topic:
Your topic – what you want to study in this project
Which of the four approaches you will choose for the topic, and the details of that choice (i.e. who you will interview, or what you will observe, or what work you will study, or what myth you will analyze)
A brief explanation of why this topic interests you
Anything else that helps flesh out the topic, including any questions you might have about it.
The total length of the Topic Choice should be about half a page, double-spaced, but you are welcome to write more. You may use the Topic Choice Worksheet if that is easier for the sake of organization, but it is optional. If you use it, download, fill it out, save it, and reupload it.
Annotated Bibliography
For the second stage of your project, you will build an annotated bibliography with three sources that will be useful to your chosen project. These must be credible, scholarly, secondary sources.
What is an Annotated Bibliography? It is a list of sources of information on a subject, with correct citations, and a paragraph associated with each source summarizing what the source says. So what you will submit will be a Word document with (at least) three sources listed. For each source include:
1. A reference formatted according to APA style guidelines
2. A paragraph of 100-150 words summarizing the source and how it is useful to your project.
Please refer back to the discussion of primary and secondary sources from the “Topic Choice” assignment when choosing and evaluating your sources. Most web pages are not considered reliable or scholarly sources… for example, don’t cite Wikipedia as a source. Look up your sources using the college library system.
If you are unfamiliar with annotated bibliographies, APA style, or forming citations, please refer to the links below for reference and review:
How to Write an Annotated Bibliography: https://sites.umgc.edu/library/libhow/bibliography_apa.cfm
APA Citation: http://research.library.gsu.edu/c.php?g=115302&p=750970
The Purdue Online Writing Lab (Purdue OWL) also has good resources on writing Annotated Bibliographies, including how to summarize, assess, and reflect:
Overview:
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/common_writing_assignments/annotated_bibliographies/index.html
Sample APA Annotated Bibliography: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/614/03/
Final Paper
For this stage of the project you will submit a Final Paper on your chosen topic. Again, the paper should deal with mythology, the relationship between mythology and culture, or the narratives that shape and accompany cultural events. As indicated in the Topic Choice section, your paper should include both primary source as well as secondary source components. For example, the paper could be about a holiday or ritual, or a particular sacred place, or compare two myths, or examine a work of art, or examine how an important speech uses mythological references, etc.
Your paper should make a point about your subject matter and support it using what you have learned in this project. Your paper should also have a reference list for the sources used to support what you say. This should have at least three sources, though it may have more. You do not need to use the same sources as you used in your Annotated Bibliography, though hopefully, these did help you write your paper.
A good outline to use to build your paper might be:
An introduction in one or two paragraphs describes the subject matter, its context, what you did to gather information from primary sources, and identifying the thesis or point about what you learned.
Several body paragraphs support the points about what you learned in this project using primary and secondary source material.
A conclusion that identifies why this is a significant topic, or identifies further questions you might want to learn about it, or otherwise identifies key issues related to your project.
A Reference list of the sources you used (at least three secondary sources should be cited).
Your paper should be about 5-6 pages long and follow APA style guidelines. Some resources to help you construct your paper are listed below:
Advice on aspects of writing:
UMUC Writing Center on the Process of writing: https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/
UNC has a variety of pages on different aspects of writing, such as choosing information, writing the paper, to developing references: http://www.umuc.edu/current-students/learning-resources/writing-center/online-guide-to-writing/tutorial/chapter2/ch2-01.html
Following APA Style:
APA Citation: http://research.library.gsu.edu/c.php?g=115302&p=750970
Purdue OWL: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/
I uploaded a plain sample and filled in topic choice but it needs to be rewritten, I also added my instruction feedback which will help in rewriting it. I need the paper choice and Annotated Bibliography by Saturday, April 6th, please.
