English 1302 “ Research Project Overview
Part One:
One of the learning outcomes of Composition II is for students to have exposure to research and writing a research paper. Therefore, the next two essays will actually be discussing the same thing. Essay #3 will be working with sources. The information from Essay #3 will be used in Essay #4 as well. You will be expected to find scholarly sources for use in these essays. With our geographical limitations, this presents a bigger challenge than in the traditional classroom, where I can help to walk you through some of this. You will be required to do a lot of problem solving on your own during this latter section of the class.
Your first task is to choose one or two social issues to think about. You might need to google a list of social issues, but there are a ton of things going on in our society right now that can be used. Once you have identified a couple of issues, try another brainstorming session to think about all of the sub-issues within that larger social issue. For instance, if my issue is LGBTQ Rights, I would have to think about marriage rights, adoption rights / problems, bathroom laws, gender surgeries, etc. There are a lot of things that can be discussed in the larger topic of LGBTQ rights. Similarly, if we take a larger topic like Race in America, we could break that down into income disparity, hiring prejudice, profiling, incarceration rates, etc.
Once you have your list of subtopics, look all of them over and find ONE that interests you. After you find the subtopic, you will then craft a QUESTION worth researching. This should be something that is not able to be answered with a simple yes or no or doesnt already have a truly definitive answer. For example, a question such as What is racial profiling? would not be appropriate for this assignment. However, something more along the lines of How has racial profiling changed in the past twenty years, and what is the best way to stop it? could be appropriate. Essay #4 is going to be a research paper (4 pages), so you need a topic that you can sustain for that length.
Selecting your topic is going to be the most important part of this process. You arent going to choose just a topic like Race. You have to work down to the subtopics and then from there, you MUST investigate a QUESTION. So, if you are interested in issues surrounding race, you need to formulate a question about that topic that is specific, yet broad enough to discuss for an extended period in Essay #4. Remember that your topics dont have to be large and earth shattering. A question such as How can hip hop help to encourage or change conversations about race? could work as well. I do encourage you to try to find something that would be interesting to you and to learn for the sake of having knowledge in an area, not just go through the motions to complete the assignment. Think about things that are currently happening in the country or world that you might want to learn more about or understand better.
Try to avoid choosing topics that you already have a very strong opinion about, unless you are going to be working to try to learn more about the topic. For instance, I would ask that you stay away from topics like Abortion or Capital Punishment, as most people have a really strong opinion about those already. The goal here is to stay open to learning more information or getting into the whys and hows of things.
As you research, you will want to find all of the information that you can on this topic, but dont feel as if you have to answer the question completely. Some of you may choose questions that are worth exploring but really have no definitive answer. That will be fine. For example, one student in one of my classes researched whether or not science and religion can co-exist. This is worth discussing, but might not be completely answerable. You will post your question in the Discussion section by the due date indicated on your schedule. I will look over your question to see if it will work and comment back to you. Please check for my response in case you have to change or adjust your question. After working with this type of assignment for a long while, I have a pretty good idea of what types of things work and what wont. If I tell you that your question wont work, please dont take it personally or think that it isnt a good question. It just might not work well for the constraints of the assignment and might be too large or too specific for our task. Please start early on this and check back often, as it can sometimes take multiple tries to get the right question for you.
Part Two:
As you search, be sure to check the type of source you are looking at. Please avoid using book reviews or anything that you dont have the full text (whole article) of. This database is already set up to search for full text, so that should not be a problem. You also will not be using books, as you dont have time to read a whole book. Additionally, try to avoid 20 page scholarly articles. The goal here is to find sources that are not TOO short, but also not TOO long. They need to have information that can help you later in the process.
If you cant find what you need on the ECC databases, then you can move to the general Internet, but be careful with the types of sources you are searching. NEVER use Wikipedia as a source in college papers, and really anything Wiki is a bad idea. You also want to avoid simple sites like encyclopedias, dictionaries, Ask Jeeves, About.com, etc. If you are not sure that a site is legitimate, just ask me.
You will need to find seven sources and put them into an MLA formatted Works Cited page, as directed by the Schedule of Readings and Assignments. (You do not need to read the sources yet, just get them in the correct format). From there, you will receive instructions about Essay #3, which is going to be what is often called an Annotated Bibliography and isnt really an essay. After completing this task, you will have all the information that you need to work on Essay #4; so in essence, you are working on ONE project for the next few weeks.