Research paper
(with thanks to Susan Strasser)


Choosing a topic - Prospectus (due Oct. 5) - Introductory Paragraph (due Nov. 2) - Complete Draft

In addition to the reading and discussions, the backbone of your work in this course will be a semester-long research paper. The final product will be a work of original historical scholarship, using both primary and secondary sources, of around 12-15 pages (not including title page and bibliography, which must also be included).

It is a good idea to mark you calendar with the due dates for different parts of this project (the prospectus, the introductory paragraph, etc.). It will be impossible to produce a successful paper if you begin working on each of the assignments only a day or two before you must hand them in.


Choosing a Topic

Successful execution of this paper will depend first and foremost on choosing a topic you are interested in enough to work on it for the next fourteen weeks. But how to choose a topic? The following guidelines may help.
1. Think about people, places, and particular time periods that interest you. Think about how things change over time. What changes might your paper describe? What conflicts or struggles did those changes entail or trigger? What general themes might your paper address? Any narrow topic provides opportunities to comment on something greater than itself. What is that something, in your project?

2. What do you hope to learn from exploring this topic? Why do you want to learn it?

3. How will you go about researching your topic? What do you already know about it? What important questions does it raise? What new questions might you want to raise? What kinds of sources do you think you might use? What frameworks or hypotheses might prove useful?

4. Make a list of keywords that you will use in researching your topic.

To stimulate your thinking about the vast universe of possible subjects you might surf some relevant websites:

Popular Culture - a website hosted by the American Studies Program at Washington State University
Popular Culture--Yellow Pages - hosted by the University of Virginia
Pop Culture - hosted by Florida Community College at Jacksonville


You may also get ideas from flipping through some popular culture-related reference books in Morris Library. (If you have trouble locating any of these, ask a reference librarian.)
  • Encyclopedia of contemporary American culture - Reference E 169.12 .E49 2001
  • St. James encyclopedia of popular culture - Reference E 169.1 .S764 2000
  • Jane Stern, Jane & Michael Stern's encyclopedia of pop culture - Reference E169.12 .S835 1992
  • Frank W. Hoffmann, Arts & entertainment fads - E161 .H63 1990 (not reference)
  • Encyclopedia of Southern culture - Reference F 209 .E53 1989 | Non-Circulating

Prospectus - due Oct. 5

The prospectus is a working document in which you will articulate--to yourself and to others--what your project is about and why. It will change as your work progresses, but it is a crucial aid. If you think of the research paper as road-trip into vast and complicated land, the prospectus is your roadmap, automobile repair manual, and GPS device all in one.

Starting the prospectus is your first stab at summarizing what you propose to do. A research paper is a highly detailed, complex work that develops as you think and learn about something over a long time. You will use your prospectus to make your work accessible to readers -- your writing partners, me, a reference librarian -- at a point where they may be able to help you by making important contributions to your thinking.

Begin work on this assignment immediately. Start with whatever section you are ready to begin writing, and don't feel you have to finish it before starting another one. Begin writing the annotations for the bibliography with the sources you have already looked at. (The bibliography will also probably be the part you finish last, since as you work on the prospectus, you will find new sources in footnotes and other bibliographies.)

Your prospectus should contain as many thoughts as you can muster; the first seeds of a draft will be in this document, and possibly a sentence or three that will migrate from here through all of the next stages.

The Prospectus will have the following sections. Each should be labeled, as follows:
I. WORKING TITLE: This may or may not be the title you will use in the end.

I. TOPIC: Who, what, when, where? State the general topic your paper will explore, including dates that mark its time span.

II. QUESTION AND TENTATIVE THESIS: How, why? State your central question and tentative thesis as succinctly as you can. Keep in mind that I am asking for a tentative thesis. More often than not, theses change -- sometimes more than once -- between this stage and the completed paper.

III. SECONDARY QUESTIONS: Write down as many secondary questions as you can, issues you need to address in order to explore your topic and demonstrate your thesis. They will structure the project; they will lead you to sources; they will be reflected in the organization. Start the first draft of your prospectus by writing as many questions as you can think of. Don't censor your thoughts; get everything out so you can see it on paper. Then edit for the draft you will show your partner and revise again to turn in to me.

IV. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TOPIC AND THESIS: Why do your topic and thesis matter? Frame them by describing how they fit into a larger body of thought or a broader investigation, and how the issues you are writing about relate to other places and other times (in the past, present, or future).

V. HYPOTHESES AND ARGUMENTS: Write a couple of paragraphs that describe and explain the facts, hunches, observations, and guesses on which you base your question and thesis. Make distinctions between facts, guesses, etc. Describe counter arguments that others might make in critique of your thesis. Describe evidence that might rebut those counter arguments.

VI. PRELIMINARY BROAD OUTLINE: Describe what you think will be the major sections of the paper - generally three to five of them - what will be discussed in each of those sections. Your outline will surely change before all is said and done. Your object in the paper, and therefore in the final outline, will be to organize your material so that it will convince your reader of what you are trying to say (your thesis). In what order will you move your reader through the material you have discovered so that she can follow you through your argument? The point now is not to commit yourself to an organizational scheme for writing, but provide yourself with a structure that will help you do your work. A hint at this stage: try making more than one outline. What happens when you arrange things differently?

VII. ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY: List all of the sources you have looked at so far: literally, the things you have found and handled. Even though you will not yet have read all the books and articles on your list, skim them sufficiently so that you can annotate them with a brief synopsis. Annotate by describing the source, especially in terms of its contribution to your project. Give bibliographic information, organized consistently, in accordance with a style manual such as Kate Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations; you will also find useful information about the hows-and-whys of footnotes on Prof. Patrick Rael's website (here). Organize the bibliography by type of source, and then alphabetically within each category.

Note that internet research alone is insufficient for this paper. You must use the library, and use it extensively.

VIII. PARTNER'S RESPONSE: Before writing the final draft of your prospectus, ask your partner to read and critique a complete draft. These responses--comments on your first draft, or printouts of email correspondence--must be attached to the Prospectus when you turn it in.

KEEP IN MIND: The Prospectus is a working document. As you continue to work on the project during the weeks that follow this assignment, you will be adding to the bibliography, rearranging your outline, and changing your questions and thesis.



Introductory Paragraph - due Nov. 2

After turning in your prospectus, you will not have another assignment due for nearly a month. In this time, it is expected that you will be working steadily, both researching and writing. Some successful scholars like to wait until they have finished their research before sitting down to write. Others write as they go along, as a way of processing the research they are immersed in. Often the kind of writing done while one is still researching is in the form of "memos" to oneself: discrete analyses of specific sources or ideas related to the paper. These memos may eventually get revised and strung together to form parts of the text of your paper. In this way, writing as you go along--while it might seem like extra work--may save you time later. Indeed, you may find that certain sections of your paper have already been drafted.

On Nov. 2, you will be expected to turn in a draft of the first paragraph of your paper. Writing the introduction to a complex work is difficult--where to begin? how to focus?--but it forces you to think about synthesizing and organizing your research and your ideas. What you write as an introduction now may vary greatly from the introduction you will use later, so don't worry if you are not completely comfortable with it yet. However, by forcing yourself to write an introduction you will become aware of what you know and what you don't know about your project at this point. If you realize that you cannot yet show evidence to support part of your argument, there is still time to research this problem.

Writing partners: Ask your writing partner to read and critique a draft of your introductory paragraph before you revise it to hand in. Your partner's written comments (or print outs of email correspondence) must be handed in with your own work

What does a good introduction look like?  Here are some general guidelines. Your introductory paragraph should be preceded at the top of the page by your title. The title of your paper may have changed from your prospectus and it may change yet again before you have completed your complete draft, but it is the first glimpse a reader gets of what your work is. A good title should be clear and informative and probably pretty precise. It might also be catchy, but watch out for cutesy, which should be avoided.

There are many ways into a paper. Some papers start with a story that captures the essence of the phenomena to be described. Some tell or show the reader how the writer got interested in the subject (not necessarily in the first person), on the assumption that this process may lead the reader, too, into engagement with the topics and themes. Some describe a problem or an issue that other scholars have confronted or examined, often using those other writers' words, and suggest a question that those words rise and the paper proposes to answer. However you choose to start, by the end of the introduction you should have articulated the thesis of the paper -- the one sentence that describes your argument.

Many scholars prefer to start writing in the middle--with the meat--of their work rather than at the beginning. You may too; this is very effective for many people. However, pausing to write an introduction (even a provisional one) will help you keep your eye on the big issues.



Complete Draft - due Friday, November 18, at noon, by email. If you use a writing application other than Microsoft Word, you must send your paper as an .rtf file or hand in a hard copy in my mailbox. You must also submit evidence of your collaboration with your writing partner, either electronically or in hard copy.

This is a first complete draft of your paper. Please note that I am not calling it a "rough draft." I expect that you will write a rough draft, revise it at least once, share the revision with your partner, and work it through yet again before turning it in to me.

The point is to produce the best possible paper at this time. If you discover a hole in your research in the course of writing this, it's ok to make a note to that effect, perhaps in brackets. But note: you will NOT have much time between this draft and the final one. During those weeks your main tasks will be a)incorporating the new understandings you will have arrived at by doing this draft and b)responding to my comments. You may have to look things up, and you will almost certainly have to return to research you've already done to answer new questions, but you won't have much time to do new research. This is why I call the complete draft "complete," rather than "rough" or "first." Plan for it accordingly.

This complete draft of your paper should have the following components:
1. TITLE - see above

2. INTRODUCTION - see above

3. BODY OF THE PAPER - By the time you finish this draft, you should have a clear idea of what every section and paragraph is about, and of how it contributes to building your case.

Paragraphs and sections are not sandwiches: the first and last sentences of a paragraph, and the first and last paragraphs of a section, should not simply paraphrase each other. Instead, use these sentences and paragraphs to make transitions from one issue, topic, or point to the next. The indentation at the beginning of a paragraph signals that the writer is moving on, but the words must communicate this, too.

In your very first and roughest draft, write notes to yourself when you're frustrated or confused: "talk about x here?" or "what about the argument that..." or "have to deal with so-and-so's book somewhere in here." This will save a lot of time staring at the screen trying to make a decision, especially when the act of writing a section or paragraph has just changed the ideas you were so sure of when you made your outline. Likewise, if the process of writing opens up a hole in your research and you can't jump up and go to the library at that moment, make notes about what you need and move on to some section that you can write. But by the time this Complete Draft is done and ready to hand in, you should have filled in all -- or almost all -- of those sections.

4. CONCLUSION: Your paper should end with a paragraph or two that sums up what you wrote and speculates on its implications. A good conclusion leaves the reader satisfied that the task at hand is completed and sends him or her off thinking about its relationship to bigger things. This conclusion need not be (indeed, is better not) set off in a separate section.

5. ENDNOTES/FOOTNOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY: You may use short form footnotes (name, title, page number) if you include a complete bibliography, or you may use long form footnotes, with complete publication information. You may use any standard style manual (I recommend Kate Turabian's manual, cited on the Prospectus assignment) -- but you must use the same style throughout. You may not use MLA style (author listed parentheses in text, list of works cited at the end).

6. ILLUSTRATIONS: Illustrations are not required, but if you do use them, each illustration should have a caption that both offers information and connects the illustration to the text. Be sure to include dates: when was the object made, when was the picture taken?

7. PARTNER'S SIGNED RESPONSE - This required part of your paper may take the form of a draft marked up by your partner, or a printout of email exchanges. You should trade papers several days before the due date, and you should show your partner the best paper you can produce. Then you should give yourself enough time to respond to your partner's critique.

Before you trade papers, read yours through out loud. Be alert to sentences that are trying to communicate too much in too few words; your readers cannot read your mind, and you must explain your ideas carefully. Be alert to words and phrases that communicate nothing ("Thus we can see that...") -- edit your prose ruthlessly and make every word count. The fewer words you used to communicate what you're trying to say, the clearer your writing will be. Use the spell checker. Then show it to your partner.

In reading your partner's drafts, don't be timid or too polite; do him or her the favor of editing, questioning, and criticizing. Ask your partner to explain or revise every sentence you don't understand. Make as many suggestions as you can, both about writing and content. The author is of course free to use them or reject them. Once you appreciate this as kindness, and recognize that what's being criticized is the work and not the person, you can help each other tremendously.