step 2: proposal (April 11)

STEP 2: PAPER PROPOSAL (due Thursday, April 11 at 5am in OAKS)

A few days after submitting your annotated bibliography, you will submit a 1-page (300-word), double-spaced, paper proposal, via OAKS. In this proposal you will present:

  • a working title for your paper
  • a description of your topic that clearly states the subject you will be investigating in your paper
  • your sense of your purpose in the project
  • and some reflection on the critical issues you’re considering in your research and expect to address in your paper itself. It can be helpful to indicate the one or two main secondary sources you anticipate working with. (By this point you will have submitted your annotated bibliography, so I can read your discussion of each source there.) You might also here point toward some areas that you’re still unsure about, etc.

I will give you feedback on these proposals quickly (in OAKS, as usual). The proposal will be worth 5% of the paper grade.

Posting your proposal to the course blog before the same deadline will earn you an extra free weekly blog post. (It will replace a missing post or will add extra points, if you’ve not missed a post.)

Here are two proposals written by students in previous classes: sample 1 and sample 2