FINAL RESEARCH ESSAY

DUE: 02 MAY 2012

OVERVIEW:

Your final project presents you with an opportunity to explore a topic you find interesting that relates to contemporary poetry being composed by poets living and writing in Ohio. The essay should provide you the chance to consider different the perspectives, arguments, and contexts that shape your subject matter, tell a certain history, or persuade an audience in a certain way.Your task will be to write a research essay in your own academic voice, integrating primary and secondary source material, and employing argumentative strategies. The paper should be a persuasive argument, but you are free to take whatever angle you choose. That is, you are free to develop your own position and solutions, etc. As you are already well aware, you need to conduct research and rely upon a significant body of source material in the form of articles, books, interviews, field research, surveys, and other secondary sources.

LENGTH & FORMAT:

The paper should be 10-12 double-spaced pages that are typed in 12-point Times New Roman font and formatted according to proper academic conventions. You will use MLA style in order to learn the standard documentation convention for writing in academic world. The first page of your document should have a heading that is properly formatted and include a relevant title. Each subsequent page should have your last name and the page number in the upper right corner (in the header), and you should include a separate Works Cited in which you identify all referenced texts.

SUBJECT SPECIFICS:

Your paper must be an argument, not a report. In other words, the entire essay should be designed to support a thesis statement through strategic use of your research and through effective use of argumentative strategies. To this extent, you should consider how to integrate effectively the multiple sources, perspectives, arguments you have been researching. I will meet with each one of you in one-on-one session to help you further refine your topic so that it is both relevant for this course and manageable for a project of this scope. Also, look to see that you have incorporated the following in the paper itself: 

A strong, unique, specific, and compelling thesis 

A fully developed introduction, body, and conclusion 

Strategic use of argumentation 

Strategic incorporation of your research as a means to support your claims through evidence (primary and secondary sources, interviews, statistics, analogies, examples, etc.) 

If pertinent to your subject: Visual rhetoric, or how visual mediate, shape, create a particular controversy, situation, issue, or phenomenon. Visual rhetoric should be both the lens of analysis and the key primary source focus 

An articulation of the context and significance of this problem

Development of your persona and a strong statement of your purpose 

The proposal of some kind of solution to the problem at hand or the delineation of a new way of looking at the issue 

Organization of your writing with attention to overall coherence, transitions, balance between parts, and the relationship of part to whole 

Understanding of the conventions of academic discourse (correct usage, diction, syntax, grammar, and documentation format) 

Documentation of sources cited using MLA style (or APA) in the body and the Works Cited page 

Insertion of images according to academic convention (Figure 1, etc.) and printed in clear ink, clean paper, in color 

No typos, careless errors, or proofreading mistakes that decrease credibility and destroy ethos