I want you to use libraries in the research for this paper.
The research paper is intended to provide a small canvas for the development of an intensely-held idea.
It is short: 5-7 pages. It should be incredibly thought-provoking. You have the opportunity to
- build and articulate ideas and information
- pick your own topic (a writer or work or idea or concept or problem you want to explore further; you are encouraged to select poets or poetics questions relevant to your own interests, commitments, and cultural/language traditions.
- build the paper over the course of 7 weeks
- write something useful and meaningful for the field of Material Poetics
- communicate your thoughts, questions, and findings to peers and instructor
Rationale: When you write, you strengthen and develop your thinking. When you research, you reduce the likelihood of falling into conventional defaults. By methodically investigating a topic, you become more expert, more confident, more useful all round. This is a short paper (5-7 pages, excluding Works Cited page), with a real communicative and community purpose: you are privileged writers in an underwritten field. The research paper also provides you with the opportunity to write a sharp paper, and practice your planning, organization, research, argument, and citation skills, in the context of meaningful interpersonal writing and contribution to a field.
Schedule of deadlines:
week 6 (4/4 + 4/6): written proposal for research paper due
- 1 paragraph stating focus
- 1 paragraph indicating methodology
- short list of principal sources and references)
week 7 (4/11 + 4/13): research paper guidelines distributed
- whole class review of assignment guidelines
- whole class review of schedule
- whole class review of submitted proposals
week 8 (4/18 + 4/20): research paper title, first paragraph + references due (1 printed sheet)
- research paper in-class writing + small groups
week 9 (4/25 + 4/27): research paper 3-page draft due (3 printed pages)
- research paper conventions (class)
week 10 (5/2 + 5/4): research paper 5-page draft due (5 printed sheets)
Liberal Arts Exam Day (5/21): Final Portfolio due
- 4 revised writings on assigned texts (2 printed pages each)
- documentation of 3 creative assignments (print / cd / dvd / flash drive / blog)
- documentation of final project
- revised research paper (5-7 pristine pages, plus Works Cited page)
- printed record of learning during the course, and conscientious self-evaluation (1-2 printed sheets)
Assignments are weighted as follows:
10 in-class writings on assigned texts, 100
3 creative writing assignments, 100
research paper, 100
final project, 100
documentation + presentation, 100
bonus: whole or part grade increase for collaborative work, leadership in community events, e.g., blog and exhibition of final projects, and significant contribution to class content, discussion, and / or critique.
All work must be documented / revised as appropriate and presented in a portfolio for final evaluation.
Examples
One perfectly valid and potentially useful and interesting approach to this assignment would be to focus your 5-7 paper on a single work of interest to you. An example of the fertility of this approach can be seen in Molly Schwartzburg's "Reading Finlay's Booklet Poems," in The Present Order which focuses principally on the booklet Two Poems (1990). See here for RISD Fleet Library holdings (4); here for John Hay Library (11).
RESEARCH PAPERS
checklist for papers
TITLE
- is it explicit?
- does it specify principal example(s)
- is it engaging?
FIRST PARAGRAPH
- does it clearly introduce the principal question / idea / topic of the paper?
- does it state how the paper will proceed?
- does it indicate why it is good strategy to proceed in this way?
- does it specify your principal example(s)?
- does it indicate why the paper is worth writing / reading?
QUOTATIONS
- is each short quotation formatted with quotation marks?
- is each short quotation followed by a parenthetical citation giving the source of the reference, e.g., (Ingold 78).
- are longer quotations formatted as block quotations, i.e., indented and without quotation marks?
- are all quotations grammatically connected to your sentence?
- writers sometimes thing citing a source means saying who the author of the quotation is. That's not sufficient. It's fine to say who the author in, in your sentence for example, but citation means giving the reader the exact information needed to track the quotation down, i.e., to tell the reader how to find the source. In parentheses, you usually put the last name of the author of the text in question, and the page number where the quotation can be found). This parenthetical citation is linked like a hinge to your Works Cited page, where all your references are ordered alphabetically, by author's name. The reader can then easily find the author and discover the title, publisher and date of publication of the work in question, which s/he can then look up and find the quote, having the page number.
brief quotations are grammatically integrated with sentence:
Note that the period goes outside the parentheses.
block quotations are connected to your sentence with a colon:
As Ingold explains:
When Gutenberg adopted textura for his first printed type, the lines disappeared
altogether. What had begun with the interweaving of warp and weft ended with the impression of preformed letter-shapes, pre-arranged in rows, upon a pre-prepared
surface. (70)
SPACING
- 1.5 line spacing is ample
TITLES
- titles of major works, e.g., books, movies, albums, journals, etc, are formatted by italicization or underlining
- titles of short works, e.g., poems, songs, essays, articles, are formatted by quotation marks
- your last name and the page number should be on every page
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ReplyDeleteYou have briefly defined that how to write a Research paper but I think it becomes little complicated for students but the tips you have written is so usefull.
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