Liberal Studies 396GW SPRING
05
One
of the major assignments in this course is a research project. The objectives of this assignment are to (1)
familiarize you with the CSUN library, (2) review general research skills, and
(3) provide an opportunity to practice annotating readings, preparing an
outline, and writing a short paper.
In
conjunction with this project, we will have a class session in the Library
devoted to research strategies. This
session will take place in Library TBA.
The date for this session is TBA.
Attendance is mandatory.
The
final product will be a 5-7 page research essay on a specific topic. You will reach this final product in several
stages:
1. Develop your
research topic. This project gives
you the opportunity to learn something more about a topic that interests
you. Pick a topic related to one of the
California Content Standards found by following this link: TOPICS
None
of the standards are an appropriate topic themselves; all of them are too broad for the
scope of this project. What you will
need to do is take the standard in an area that interests you and then develop
into a much narrower, more focused research question. See the attached guide on how to narrow a
paper topic.
The
general topic of your paper must be approved by your instructor WEEK 3.
2. Find sources and prepare annotated
bibliography. You must use 3
sources for your paper (you can use more).
Go to the library and collect two academic print
references (academic journal articles or book chapters) and one internet
source. Your “print” sources can be
delivered electronically, but they must come from peer-reviewed scholarly
journals whose articles also appear in print editions (generally speaking, encyclopedias,
textbooks, and popular media don’t “count” as scholarly, peer-reviewed sources).
Be careful with Internet sources.
They should include an author and page publisher’s name. For information about how to choose reliable
internet sources see:
http://library.csun.edu/mwoodley/Webeval.html
You
should use a standard format (APA, MLA, Chicago) to
format your bibliography. Annotated
bibliographies also include three-four sentences on what the source contains
and why it’s relevant to your project. See
the attached guide for an example.
The
annotated bibliography is due WEEK 5.
3. An
outline and thesis. Continue with
the project by re-reading your sources and formulating a thesis (a specific
argument or position on the topic) for your paper. After you do sufficient research, you should
be able to outline the project in some detail. The
outline should reflect your approved topic, your approved sources, and
demonstrate clearly the argument you will make in the paper and the scope of
the information you have to support that argument. See the attached guides on how to formulate a
thesis and prepare an outline
Your thesis statement and outline are due WEEK 9 OR 10
4. The paper. Using all of the above, the actual paper is
a five-seven page research essay in the argumentative style. It should be typed, double-spaced and
proofread. It should rely on your
approved sources, follow your approved outline, and mirror your proposal. It needs to be full of your original ideas;
any material taken from another source must be cited appropriately in the text
and in the bibliography (see attached brief-guide to proper citation; use
online source listed above for more detailed instructions). Your paper should include a non-annotated
bibliography in the same citation style you used in the annotated version. For more information about the argumentative
style, see the attached guide.
Drafts:
Instructors should put their draft policy here. You may do drafts in whatever way you feel
comfortable, but students must have a re-write
The
following criteria will be considered when grading your paper:
The
final version of the research essay is due WEEK 13 OR 14
For
more information on writing a research paper see the OWL (Online Writing Lab)
website at
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/workshops/hypertext/ResearchW/index.html
CHOOSING A
PAPER TOPIC[1]
How to know if you need to either broaden or narrow down
your topic
The
first clue is simply the stated length of your research paper. You can't
properly discuss "war" in 1,000 words, nor talk about orange rinds
for 12 pages. Use your common sense first, then use
the concrete feedback you get from the library system.
Preliminary
research offers two additional practical guides to determine whether or not
you'll even need to refine your topic. Chances are good that you will, but at
least asking yourself this question gets you to understand why you would have
to.
The
amount of resources is often a great guide. For example, if you were
either specifically asked for or think you'd need no more than about six to
eight references for your paper and there are over 50 books, that's a good sign
to narrow your subject area to a more specific topic. Or vice-versa, if you're
writing a whopping 15-page research paper where you can easily imagine yourself
consulting, if not citing, a couple dozen sources and only five pop up as a
result of all your innovative searches, better start "broadening"
your horizons, as it were.
The
other great guide, which is still concrete but a bit more subjective, is the popularity
of the subject area or topic itself. There are two separate elements to
consider here. First, there is popularity in relation to the general library-going
population who, like you, read up on topics of personal interest. As a matter
of course more individuals are going to take out books by Stephen King or on
job-hunting than books by straight academics like Jacques Derrida or on
historiography or animal symbolism. That's a bit of common sense to remember
the next time you try to research the fashion or travel industries which have a
broader societal, not just strictly academic, appeal. Second, popularity will
rear its head more specifically in relation to students in your class or other
academics who might also be interested in working with the topic during the
same semester.
Both
of these elements will definitely factor into your topic choice. So even if the
topic is great and the number of resources is perfect, they may just all sadly
say beside them not "On Shelf" but "Due back ##/#/##" which
turns out to be way too late for you!
So you need to refine: how to go about doing it
A. Narrowing
One-
or even two-word topics are more aptly called subjects and thus are the most
usual culprit for this kind of change; too short is usually too broad. To add
more meaningful words--and thus limiters--to your "topic," use the
journalist's 5Ws to restrict your subject to a particular time, place, kind,
quality etc.
For
example, a sample subject might be "Postcolonialism."
How could that be narrowed? What about changing it to an adjective and then
asking one of our 5 Ws? Now we have: Postcolonial what? Maybe postcolonial
ATTITUDES is something you're interested in. A natural
question to follow what could now be who, or in this example, where are those
attitudes originating from? So from just straight "Postcolonialism"
you now have a specific topic like "Postcolonial attitudes in
ARGUMENTATIVE
(OR PERSUASIVE) PAPERS
(IN CONTRAST TO
ANALYTICAL PAPERS)[2]
The
Student Services staff at
In
direct contrast to the analytical paper, your approach here is to take a
stand on an issue and use evidence to back-up your stance, not to
explore or flesh out an unresolved topic. This stance, this debatable statement or
interpretation, is
known as your thesis.
Argumentative
or persuasive papers, as these names suggest, are attempts--after all, essay
does come from the French word essai, or
"attempt"--to convince the reader of a debatable or controversial
point of view.
That
point of view--your thesis--and not some research question, is the core of this
breed of paper.
Convention
has it that theses are generally found in the introductory paragraph(s), which
makes sense considering your reader will get frustrated if your persuading
point isn't stated early on. This is why guides to true ANALYTICAL papers avoid
using the word "thesis" altogether and describe you as "drawing
conclusions." They recognize that your critical evaluations, insights, and
discoveries are going to be located toward the end of the paper and so are not
theses in the true sense of the word.[3]
In
true research paper fashion, we have just laid out the difference between
analytical and argumentative papers in a more abstract form. To drive the point
home, here is a concrete example:
For
an ANALYTICAL research paper, let's say you have decided to explore "the
purpose of madness in Renaissance tragedies." You don't have an answer
in mind to turn that into a sentence (that wouldn't be following the purpose of
your paper!) so you do some research to locate instances of insanity in various
plays. The body of the paper would
analyze or break down the topic into three or four "parts" which will
later become the main paragraphs of your draft. Perhaps your research helps you
discover several purposes to madness in these tragedies, with your paper
devoting a paragraph to considering each. Or perhaps there's debate among
scholars as to the main purpose of madness, so you decide to present some of
these varying opinions. However you choose to explore the topic, in the body of
your paper you'd be using evidence from the plays themselves (a.k.a. primary
sources) and expert opinions on the plays (a.k.a. secondary sources).
Your concluding paragraph(s) would finally incorporate some of your
critical interpretations of both the plays and the experts' essays. Here, you'd
include a critical evaluation and discussion of your overall findings as well
as some conclusions based on the patterns you've researched or detected
yourself to make some final comments about the purpose of madness in
Renaissance tragedies.
Now,
an ARGUMENTATIVE paper would lay out exactly what you consider to be the
purpose of madness in Renaissance tragedies in a declarative sentence right in
the introduction--the thesis statement. Thus, the template would change
accordingly to "the purpose of madness in Renaissance tragedies is
______ (for comic relief? to provide a reflection of
moral chaos? and so on and so forth)." See, it
ceases to be just a topic (notice above that our topic for the analytical paper
is not a sentence!) and has become instead an interpretation. The
course of the paper will develop why you believe--and importantly, why the
reader should believe--what you do.
This
time, you'll select only that evidence (still examples from plays and opinions
from experts) which directly supports your thesis. The body of your
paper turns into a site for laying out the proof you've collected rather than a
canvas for delineating a topic. And considering that scholars still debate the
psychological state of Prince Hamlet (close to 400 years after the play was
written!), there is no right or wrong answer. You will not get a bad mark if
your professor happens to completely disagree with your thesis. That's not the
point. Solid back-up and convincing arguments, not safe thesis statements, are
what make for happy profs.
Because
your insights, which are what your professors are most interested in,
are the very fulcrum on which an argumentative paper balances rather than just
interspersed or tacked on the end of analytical papers, argumentative papers
are p
THESIS STATEMENT
AND DETAILED OUTLINE[4]
Thesis
Statement
Your research
project is not supposed to be a summary of the materials you read on your
subject. Rather, you are expected to
make some kind of argument about your topic.
That is, you should choose a point of view and provide evidence to
support that point of view from your materials.
Having this point of view will help you organize your material and make
your paper more coherent.
A thesis
statement is the claim you make in your argument (you will then back up this
claim with evidence and interpretations of your reference materials in the rest
of the paper). Your thesis statement
should be concise and well-grounded in the evidence you have available. Do not make assertions you cannot
substantiate with evidence.
Outline
Your outline
should be prepared after you have gathered a significant portion of your
material for your paper. The outline
should grow out of the material you have available; it is not a statement of
what you would like to find.
Your
outline is a schematic statement of the material that is to be presented in
your paper, showing evidence you will draw upon to support your thesis. It should indicate the order of topics and
the general relationship between them.
The purpose of the outline is to make writing both easier and more
efficient by laying out the organization of the paper and the material you will
present. In his book, The Secrets of
Successful Writing, Dewitt Scott
says, “You save yourself work with an
outline. With it you can ask yourself about every fact, anecdote or quote you
write: Does it relate to a point in my outline? If not, you’re getting off the
track (or else you’ve discovered another point you should have included).” Your
outline may also reveal gaps in the material that you need to fill in.
There is no
correct number of main heads and sub-heads in your outline. The number of sections in your outline will
be determine by the number of points you want to make
and the length of your paper. The small
points of the material should be arranged under the main heads and sub-heads to
which they belong, as illustrated on the other side of this handout.
The most common
type of formal outline is the topic outline.
The subjects are noted in brief phrases or single words, numbered
hierarchically and consistently. It is a
good idea to put a sentence stating the subject and scope of the whole paper
between the title and the first main head.
If this is done, it should be a full, meaningful sentence, not a simple
announcement of the topic. Each main
head and subhead should be meaningful, understandable by itself. General labels like "Causes"
"Data," or "Results" are useless.
EXAMPLE:
Pottery
Production Among the Ancient
The ancient
I.
Introduction
II.
Aesthetics: Style and Form
A. To the untrained eye, most ancient
1. With few exceptions, pottery is bichrome: black on
white
a. but some is
black on white; some black on cream
b. polychromes
were added late in prehistory
2. Most ancient
a. within this
category, however, pottery was variable
(1) types of
geometric shapes
(2) arrangement of
those shapes
i. complex symmetry patterns
b. Mimbres pottery had natural, figurative designs
A. Archaeologists divide ancient
1. some types
reflect cultural differences
2. some types
reflect geographic differences
3. some types
reflect temporal differences
B. Ancient
1. (descriptive
list of vessel forms)
a. many of these
forms are quite complex and difficult to make
2. differently
shaped vessels were p
III. Technology:
we know a lot about how the pottery was made
A. Pottery was made by hand
1. analysis of
vessels shows they were formed by coiling
2. archaeologists
have found few pottery-making tools
3.
skilled potters were able to make elaborate,
well-constructed vessels using these techniques
B. Vessels were fired in open pits
1. archaeologist
occasionally find firing pits at ancient sites
2. no kilns have
been found
3. open
firings produced high-quality pots
C. Potters chose their materials carefully
1. clays usually
came from close to communities
2. pigments may
have been traded for several hundred km
IV. Organization of production
A. Based on analogy, we think women made
pots
1. historical
data indicate women made pots
2. men are only
just learning to make pots in the late 20th century
B. Pottery was made at every village
1. from village
to village, pottery is variable
2. many
people had the skill to make these pots (they weren’t “specialists)
C. Pottery was made within peoples' homes
1. tools used to
make pottery are found in domestic contexts
2. no
"workshops" have been found
V. Summary and Conclusions
A.
Ancient Pueblo pottery was technologically, formally, and stylistically quite
sophisticated
B.
However, this pottery was not made by a small number of “specialists”; most
women made pottery
C. These data suggest objects that are complex,
beautiful, and functionally important can be made by large numbers of people in
the community
BRIEF GUIDE TO CITATIONS
AND REFERENCES[5]
References
refer the reader to information about the sources you used to prepare your
paper. You will use two kinds of references in your paper, citations and a
bibliography, and they will appear in two different places in your paper.
When
you quote a person or a publication, describe their ideas, or use
information/data collected and/or analyzed by anyone other than yourself, you
are using a source that must be identified. If you use someone else’s words,
ideas, or data and do not give them credit, you are guilty of plagiarism which
means stealing someone else’s ideas. Plagiarism is considered scholastic
dishonesty, and it is punishable under academic discipline rules. INSTRUCTORS: INDICATE YOUR PLAGIARISM POLICY HERE.
Sources
are briefly identified in the body of the paper; this is called an in-text
citation. At the end of your paper, a bibliography provides complete information
about your sources.
References
come in several styles. A psychology class might require a different style of
references than a history class. You can
use any regularly employed style (MLA, APA, etc), as long as you are
consistent.
In-text Citations
In
most styles, you will briefly identify each of your sources after you write
about them in the body of the paper. In parentheses, give the last name of the
author followed by the page number, such as (Jones 84). Some styles require that you also provide the
date of publication (Jones 1993:84). If
you do not know the author, use the first words of the title followed by the
page number, such as (Water Temperatures 45). If using an Internet source, you
p
Here
is an example:
In-text
citation in the body of the paper (using MLA format):
Large
numbers of fish have been observed around artificial reefs near
In
the Bibliography:
Tanji, Edwin. “Big Sharks
Eschewing Artificial Reefs.”
1993: 24.
Bibliography
Information for your paper can come from many kinds of
sources such as books,
journals,
or the Internet. Each type
requires a slightly different bibliography format. It can get complicated. Generally, list your sources alphabetically by
last name of author (or title if author is unknown).
For a short guide to MLA and APA citation
styles see:
http://library.csun.edu/mwoodley/usecitations.html
[1] Adapted
from the OWL (Online Writing Lab) at
[2] Adapted from the OWL (Online Writing Lab) at
[3] While it
would be really useful to call them thesis papers from here on in (since a
proper argumentative paper should always have a thesis statement), we can't use
that name. Technically, a real "thesis paper" is the name given to
the research projects pursued at levels of university beyond a
Bachelor's Degree. Since you're p
[4]The discussion in this handout
was adapted in part from Perrin, P. G. (1950) Writer's Guide and Index to
English, revised edition. Scott, Foresman.
[5] This
handout was derived in large part from the website, “Students’ Friend, http://www.studentsfriend.com/index.html