Research Paper Instructions
10 pages, size 12 Times New Roman, double spaced
APA citations, 8 scholarly sources
Works Cited page (not included in 10 pg requirement)
****CAN CONTINUE WITH YOUR FIRST IDEA ABOUT THE FRENCH REVOLUTION****
-MAKE RESEARCH QUESTION MORE OPEN ENDED
-DISCUSS POSSIBLE FACTORS THAT CAUSED IT
FEEDBACK GIVEN ON ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY: While this is a good start, your Research Question needs to be open-ended. You need to have a specific historical outcome that you trace and you have to look at what factors caused it. You can choose the french revolution as an outcome, or a defined event related to womens rights (e.g., womens right to vote), and trace various causes for it (being the french revolution one that you look into).
Make Research Question more open-ended (allowing for multiple possible answers) (ex: How has the French Revolution affected modern day life? etc)
General Instructions: For this assignment you will conduct research on a historical outcome, then write a 10-page research paper in which you seek to explain a historical outcome. Building on the feedback you received on your annotated bibliography, you will find additional sources that help you understand and explain the historical outcome youve chosen to study. Then you will write up what you found through your research.
In your research paper, you will start by posing a research question, then use information from at least eight credible, outside sources to help you answer this question. If there are different and/or competing answers, you will assess them and offer your view on whether some are stronger than others. This assignment is worth 30% of your overall grade in the course.
Format: Your paper should be 10 pages double-spaced, with 12-point font and normal margins. (You can go slightly over or under 10 pages, but please keep it within the range of 9-11 pages).
At the top of the first page, please put a title for the paper and your name. (You can have a separate title page if you prefer). At the end of your paper, have a list of references that begins on a separate page. The list of references does not count towards the page requirement.
Organization: Your paper should be organized into the following sections. You can use headings to separate sections or sub-sections.
1. Introduction (1-2 paragraphs)
A. A brief description of the historical outcome
B. Your research question (which should be very clearly stated)
C. A brief description of what kinds of sources you draw on to help you answer your questions (e.g., newspaper articles from when the event occurred)
D. Short summary of the answer(s) you found
2. Optional: Description of Outcome (2 pages maximum)
A. You may want to have a section where you describe your historical outcome in more detail before going into its causes, especially if it seems necessary for understanding the different possible explanations.
3. Answer(s) to RQ (bulk of your paper. You can break this into sub-sections)
A. Describe evidence and/or arguments from sources that answer your RQ.
i. Make sure its clear how it answers your RQ
B. Present information in a synthetic way (see below for more details)
i. Point out if sources confirm the same facts, or instead contradict other sources
ii. Point out if sources are presenting similar or different answers to your RQ
iii. If there are different answers, explain if they are complimentary or contradictory
4. Conclusion (1-2 paragraphs)
A. Restate your research question
B. Summarize the a
nswer(s) based on the sources you found. Re-cite the sources.
i. If relevant, point out conflicting answers from different sources, and say which one(s) you think seem more plausible (based on what you know about the topic)
Historical Outcome and Research Question: Before you start on this assignment, be sure to consider the feedback you receive on your annotated bibliography. You should adjust your historical outcome and/or research question if necessary.
Remember, your historical outcome must be a specific real-world phenomenon an event, social change, or specific feature of society that can be explained historically. Your research question should be asking about the causes/explanations of the outcome. See the instructions for the annotated bibliography for more information about choosing an outcome and developing a research question.
Sources: You must find at least 8 credible sources from which to incorporate information/evidence for your research paper. As with the annotated bibliography, keep in mind that you may need more than the minimum number of sources to do a good job of answering your research question; it depends how much information you can get out of each source. (For example, 8 full-length books would likely be sufficient, but 8 brief news articles would not be).
Some of your sources can just provide information about the historical outcome itself. However, the bulk of your sources should help you answer your research question. You can use assigned readings and lectures from Sociology 110 as sources for your paper, but they do not count towards the requirement to have at least 8 sources.
See the feedback on your annotated bibliography to determine how many more sources you need to find at this stage of your research. If some of the sources you described on your annotated bibliography were not credible or useful, then youll need to find others.
Synthesis in Research and Writing: For your final paper, you will need to synthesize information from numerous sources. One element of this is fact-checking. For claims about your topic (what happened, who was involved, etc.) try to find multiple sources to confirm that these claims are accurate. Then, when you reference these facts in your paper, cite multiple sources at once to show they are well-supported.
Another element is figuring out how different sources answer your research question. As mentioned above, most of the sources you use should either implicitly or explicitly tell you about why the outcome occurred. Sort your sources by the different explanations they offer. Then, in the paper itself, make it clear which sources are supporting a particular explanation, and contrast them with sources that present a different reason why the outcome occurred. You might even organize your paper into sub-sections, with each presenting a different explanation, then assess which one(s) is most convincing at the end.
Finally, another way you can synthesize information from multiple sources is by presenting it as a narrative (see Lecture 6). As an alternative to dividing up your paper into sections that discuss different explanations, you might instead put most (or all) of the information into a chronological order. Instead of talking about information from each source separately, you would present each piece of information where it fits temporally. (You can also present some information in narrative form, and other information in non-chronological order; it really depends on the sources you have to work with).