proposal paper

A proposal is a short document that presents a tentative thesis and sketches its support. What it proposes is a longer essay that will ultimately flesh out the skeleton it describes. Proposals are often required in academic contexts. For instance, they are the standard device by which conference organizers choose the papers that will appear in their programs. They also are often required at an early stage of a seminar. The proposal you write for 301 will both enable you to plan effectively for your final paper (see the final paper assignment for further details) and provide a focus for feedback from your peers as you shape your argument.

In order to write a coherent proposal, you will need to begin your writing process with a stage in which you allow your ideas to take shape before you attempt to organize them into an argument. Work closely with the story you intend to write about, using freewriting, brainstorming, clustering, and/or other right-brained approaches, then let your ideas lie on paper for a while before you return and attempt to organize them. The narrative portion of your final draft should be approximately 300 words in MLA style, headed by the working title of your paper. The body should clearly state your thesis at the outset in a separate paragraph. For a paper as short as this one, it should be possible to state your thesis in one relatively straightforward sentence, which will likely fit the analytical thesis template we have discussed many times. Then the body of the proposal narrative (typically only one or two fairly short paragraphs) will sketch the main evidence that will support the stated thesis.

            An annotated bibliography, in the most general sense, is simply what the title indicates: a bibliography that includes short notes regarding the content of each item it lists. The emphasis of these annotations will vary from one context to another. Specialist journals, for instance, often publish bibliographic issues that will indicate the general argument of the items they list and evaluate their usefulness to scholars in the field the journal targets. There are also many bibliographic volumes that cover, for instance, scholarly work over a given period on a single author and indicate how each item fits into the larger field the volume covers. An annotated bibliography that serves as part of a proposal, however, will be more focused than these examples. It will ultimately include items that are related not only to the general topic you intend to address in your essay, but to the specific thesis you intend to support. The annotations of these carefully chosen selections, then, will indicate a) not necessarily the general argument of the item in question, but the specific aspects of it that are relevant to your particular project, and b) how the indicated aspects of the item's argument are related to yours (e.g., you might indicate how your argument will extend the indicated argument, refute it, or use its approach as a model).

            For this assignment, your initial annotated bibliography should include at least four items (your final paper may address more sources than your proposal does and/or a slightly different list, but the works cited page for the final paper will of course not be annotated). The bibliography should include only sources that are directly related to your specific topic. Once you have gathered your sources, you will then prepare a list of works cited that differs from MLA style only insofar as each of the items is followed by a short paragraph meeting the criteria for content outlined above; in form, each annotation should be 25-50 words indented five spaces from the left margin, double-spaced, starting on a new line after the works cited entry (see the "Sample Annotations" handout). While the annotations might not tie the items to specific pieces of your argument in this initial exercise, they should at least clearly indicate their relevance to your argument. Note that for your final paper, your works cited will need to meet that following criteria:

1.    at least three of the sources are critical arguments that address the same story (other sources might be biographical, historical, or theoretical sources, or relevant critical arguments about clearly related works);

2.    at least three of them are print (or full-text equivalent of print) sources, with at least one book and at least one critical periodical represented.

If your annotated bibliography does not yet meet all these criteria you will not yet be penalized, but your final paper's works cited will need to meet all these criteria.

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