Your proposal should be 400-500 words long not including the bibliography. Please post your proposal to the blog. This assignment sheet also serves as the assignment sheet for the final project (as it sketches out the broader contours of that assignment as well).
Your proposal should include the following:
- An intriguing and informative title.
- A brief, engaging introduction that identifies your primary sources when relevant and strategically frames your project. You can do this in any number of ways, but successful strategies include establishing broader contexts for your project (historical, theoretical, generic), offering a model engagement with your text, and / or emphasizing why your topic is timely and important.
- A tentative—but pointed and specific—project goal. For critical projects, this will be a research question or, if your project is more developed, a hypothesis. For creative projects, this will be a statement of intent. The goal here is to articulate what you hope to achieve in this independent project.
- A focused account of the conversation your project is entering. This might include key critical arguments or creative practices that you hope to engage and extend. If possible, try to cite at least three, though there won’t be room to introduce any substantial quotations. Here, you can also return to describe relevant theoretical, methodological, or creative foundations for your project that you might have begun to sketch out in your introduction.
- A project timeline, noting completion dates for specific stages of the project (annotated bibliography, drafts, final copy, etc.). Refer to syllabus for specifics. Please also note the anticipated size and scope of the project as well as what form the project will take (traditional paper? web project? anthology?). Note that this is supposed to be a substantial final project–the equivalent of a 15-20 page term paper with a minimum of 10 sources (and likely more informing the process along the way).
Your proposal should include a bibliography that includes a suitable combination of at least 10 primary and secondary sources. You can produce this bibliography however you like, but it is probably easiest to provide a hyperlinked list rather than use MLA.
Note that the bullet points above suggest important content that you should include in your proposal, but do not themselves represent paragraphs. Your proposal itself will unfold in strategically organized paragraphs that combine and order these points as relevant to your project. The bullet points are also not exhaustive. You might, for example, want to touch upon relevant skills, qualifications, and academic experiences that you bring to the project.
