Guidelines for Paper #4 (the Research Paper)

Peer Editing draft due 11/22/99
Final Draft Due 11/24/99 at 5:00 pm

Research papers for Humanities 1 should incorporate at least three print sources. In most cases, these will be scholarly books or journal articles. You may use Internet-based sources in addition to print sources, but since part of the idea behind the assignment is to familiarize you with Honnold Library and the resources it offers, articles you find on web sites (including electronic journals) will not count towards your final tally.

At a basic level, the research paper assignment is much like the assignment for argumentative papers: you will pick a text (possibly more than one), develop a thesis about it, and support your analysis with evidence from it. Successful research papers use outside sources to enhance one or more aspects of their interpretation. Less successful research papers tend to suffer from one or more of a few common problems:

• They contain adequate references to secondary sources, but they fail to develop a cohesive argument. Writers of such papers give up their own critical voice; they get "lost" in their research.
• They use sources that shed little light on their primary argument or have a weak relationship to the text or film being analyzed.
• They contain only passing references to secondary sources, demonstrating a failure to engage with the arguments other authors have advanced.

To avoid such pitfalls, start by clearly identifying your interpretive goals. Common approaches include, but are not limited to:

Literary approaches. Many students will read sources that qualify as literary interpretation. These sources, often found in the MLA Bibliography, develop arguments about literary texts. For examples, see Caitlin Devereaux's use of critics McConnell and Maltby, and Brett Helms' use of critics Corngold and Richter.

Helpful hints : If you agree with a critic's textual interpretation, you might quote him or her to add weight to your own interpretation. If you disagree with what you read, consider spending some time discussing--and then refuting--the argument advanced.

Contextual/historical approaches. You may also explore the ways in which social, cultural, or political context affect a text or film. For example, to ground an argument about the governmental systems referred to in More's Utopia, you might take a closer look at events in the Tudor court during and before More wrote the book. Similarly, to illuminate the cultural backdrop of a text like Catch-22, you might take a closer look at relevant aspects of American culture during the McCarthy years.

Helpful hints: Imprecision, always undesirable in Humanities papers, is even less desirable in a research paper. Avoid making sweeping generalizations about an era or culture, and don't indulge in anachronism. For example, a paper making both of these errors might refer repeatedly to "the '70s" when analyzing Harold and Maude, even though the film was released in 1971 (and therefore both written and filmed before then, when the '70s were hardly in full force.)

There are other approaches you could take, and many students combine the ones I have described above. If you would like to take on another type of project, please clear your ideas with me first.