rough draft

Ideas and sources you will use for your rough draft

Once you have a general overview of existing literature on your topic, you can begin to structure your own research. To give this structure a concrete shape, you are required to submit a 3-page overview of your proposed project that includes:

• a 1-page discussion of what your paper will do — what ideas will your paper explore, how will it explore those ideas, and why are they import ideas to investigate? In other words, you must make an argument for how your project has emerged from the ideas and questions you have chosen. Make sure to include a series of research questions that your paper will think through.

• a 1-page discussion of primary sources you will use. List at least 3 primary sources — for example, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Martin Heidegger’s “What Are Poets For?,” and Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In other words, what are the major objects your paper will explore? Please explain how you have chosen those sources, how you will use them in your paper, and what evidence they will provide.

• a 1-page discussion of secondary sources you will use. List at least 3 secondary sources, ones that comment on the primary sources that you have already listed. Explain how you’ve chosen these sources, how you will use them in your paper, and how these sources will help you to talk about your ideas.

Please keep the following points in mind when working on this stage of your paper:

• You are not required to incorporate this analysis into subsequent stages of your paper — you can change course at any time.

• You need to read more than just the abstracts on these articles/ sources to understand how they will help you write your paper.

• You yourself choose what counts as a primary source and what counts as a secondary source based on the needs of your project. For example, a paper on the Harry Potter universe may have the novels themselves as primary sources and reviews of the novels as secondary sources. By contrast, a paper about how Harry Potter novels are reviewed will have the reviews themselves as primary sources, with additional material included as secondary sources based on how it helps us understand why the reviews are written in the way that they are.

• You do not need an introduction or a conclusion for this stage of your paper, just 3 pages of analysis.

4 copies of your rough draft and self-review letter

Here is where you can try out some of the ideas you have to see if they make sense to you, your classmates, and me. Your rough draft must:

• Be at least 5 pages long. • Include a works cited page and in-text citations in MLA format. • Include an introductory section that sets up the ideas of the paper — what is it about,

how are you going to talk about what you are going to talk about, and why is the discussion important?

• As you are writing, keep asking yourself the following questions — what is the paper arguing? how are you developing the argument throughout the paper, not just in the introduction and conclusion? what do your readers need to know about these ideas, and how are you going to communicate those things to them?

• Include a conclusion that doesn’t summarize what you’ve already said (your reader has just read what you’ve said) but explains the importance or implications of your argument.

In addition to you rough draft, you must include a self-review letter:

• 1 page, double-spaced. • Explain to your readers what you think works well in the draft, what needs more

work, and describe how your readers can help you develop the draft. Please pose at least 3 specific questions to your readers that ask them to respond to your writing and your ideas — you may want to ask them where they think your argument most clearly emerges in your paper.

And finally, please bring 4 copies of your rough draft and 4 copies of your self-review letter to class on the due date. One copy is for me, and one copy is for each of the other 3 students in the peer-review group to which I will assign you.