Your last written assignment for this class is a 7-page to 10-page, 1,500 to 2,500-word research essay on a current issue or enduring question of your choice. You will use documented source material to support your essay’s thesis. However, this First Draft assignment requires only 5 to 10 paragraphs (or more) of text. You are not required to use sources or a Works Cited page for the First Draft.
A research essay presents and develops a thesis supporting multiple sources of opinion. You stake out a subject narrow enough to be researched and you steep yourself in it. Then you formulate a thesis — your own attitude or opinion on the subject — and present it in an analytical and/or argumentative form, along with facts, opinions, and information that prove it true. You should use appeals and other methods to support your thesis, but you should also analyze each source you plan to use to support your thesis.
The Parts of a Research Essay
There are two parts to a Research Essay:
The text (7 to 10 pages, 1,500 to 2,500 words)
The works cited page / annotated bibliography (one or more pages)
Research Essay Format
Much of the writing in your research essay comes from the work of other writers, and you must give proper credit by citing (mentioning) these sources in your paper. The art of citing is called documentation, which is required for any information falling into the following three categories:
Any judgment, opinion, speculation or theory that is not original (unless it is universally known and accepted).
Any fact or statistic open to dispute.
Any information provided by a specific observer, even by an expert in his or her field (for example, opinions of psychologists on child abuse).
Sources
For your Final Draft, you must use quote and cite passages from six to ten scholarly sources (one or more from each of the following categories) and list them on your works cited page. You may use our campus library’s Website to find and access these sources.
Google Scholar Links to an external site.is another good source of written sources.
one book;
one periodical (magazine, journal or newspaper) article;
one website;
one “multimedia” source: a film, video, DVD, photo, musical piece, etc.).
Works Cited Page
Your Annotated Bibliography will serve as the Works Cited page for this essay assignment. Your sources should be listed in alphabetical order, by the author’s last name. Your source listings for books should look like this: Author’s last name, author’s first name, title of book, name of publisher, and year of publication.
For example, if we were listing author Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Bean Trees:
Works Cited
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Bean Trees. HarperCollins, 1988.
(The publisher and year of publication can usually be found at the beginning of a book, before the title page.)
Your source listings for articles should look like this: Author’s last name, author’s first name, title of article, name of magazine or newspaper, date of article, article’s page numbers.
For example, if we were listing Kenneth L. Woodward’s Newsweek article, “Hail, Mary”:
Works Cited
Woodward, Kenneth L. “Hail, Mary.” Newsweek. August 25, 1997: pp. 49-55.
Quotations and Citations
You will use quotations to include information from your sources in your essay. For example, if you were quoting a Newsweek magazine article on the Virgin Mary by Kenneth L. Woodward, you could write:
Kenneth L. Woodward, in his article on the Virgin Mary, writes that “the 20th century has belonged to Mary” (Woodward 49).
Or…..
According to Kenneth L. Woodward, the 20th century has “belonged to Mary” (49).
Or…..
Kenneth L. Woodward writes: “The 20th century has belonged to Mary” (49).
You will use the MLA (Modern Languages Association) style for parenthetical documentation to list your sources on your Works Cited page, which is the last page of your essay.
