Your paper should be 2,000 words +/- 10%, not counting titles or your Works Cited. You will lose
partial points for writing less than 1,800 words or more than 2,200 words.
Keep in mind that a critical paper utilizes your own personal voice and writing style but is not a
personal essay or an opinion piece. The paper should interpret and analyze texts, evaluate the
arguments of authors, and formulate a response to the topic chosen which is supported by evidence.
You are welcome to bring in whatever examples you see fit but remember that you should show
evidence of having read and understood the course readings that you utilize in your paper and you are welcome to bring in readings from other weeks and/or
from outside of the course.
Please reference at least one of the required readings from class in your paper. You should cite at
least 5 sources total, referring to them in the text and including them in your Works Cited. The
recommended readings should also be helpful here. Feel free to cite these as sources along with
others you may find. Please make sure at least 3 of your sources are academic sources (books or
journal articles). You are welcome to also cite news/online articles, including but not limited to
the ones we read in class, but be careful in selecting web
articles based on quality.
The style of your citations is up to you (e.g. MLA, Chicago, Harvard), but they should be
consistent, and you should generally use page numbers (or ‘n.p.’ for no page) if you use direct
quotes within the text.
In the Works Cited, you should normally include the author(s), date, title, publication the text can
be found in (e.g. the name of a book the chapter is in, the name and issue of the journal an article
is in, the name and issue of the newspaper an article is in), the total pages of the cited text (if
applicable), and the publisher and location (if a book). Most styles require you to include a link
for web sources, if you use a news article or journal article that can be found online.Possible Sources: Possible examples of “scientific racism” and “scientific sexism” to consider.IQ tests: French and American psychologists from 1850s-1990sPossible source: J. Blaine Hudson, “Scientific Racism: The Politics of Tests, Race and Genetics”Primates and Gender: American primatologists from 1950s-1980sPossible (difficult) source: Donna Haraway, “Primatology is Politics by Other Means”Sociobiology: American sociobiologists from 1970s-2000sPossible source: Robert Sussman, “What a tangled web they also weave: the new sociobiology.”