Proposal Assignment Sheet

Proposal Assignment Sheet

Overview

Our next assignment deals with a brief, but equally important form of academic writing: the proposal. You may develop the paper you propose here as your final Research Paper, if you choose, or you can pick a new topic for that paper.

For a number of reasons, the proposal is an assignment you will want to master for our class and beyond. In upper level classes, you may write proposals for long projects and essays. You will also use proposals in formulating business plans and almost any group project that involves producing documents or other deliverables. Proposals are also embedded in the writing process itself in the Invention stage of discovering an idea. Finally, a proposal is often the first step in taking action to get something done or secured in many industries, including grant writing or government offices, as well as a variety of other areas of work. Proposals, and proposal writing, count a great deal. Our Proposal Assignment will take a general approach and provide you with the basics to build on in your later courses.

The Assignment

For our assignment, I want you to write a proposal on a topic that interests you. I want to give you maximum freedom to let your mind roam here, but I am limiting you to a topic that is in some way related to the readings you will have done by the end of the semester. Thus, you will have to read aheada bit to get a full choice of texts. You are allowed to reuse the topic you wrote on for your Multi-Source Essay, if you feel you have not yet said all you wanted to say about that topic; you will obviously, however, need to show in your proposal how you will greatly expand your research and rewrite that first essay in this case.

Assignment Specifics

Your Proposal should be between 2-3 pages long and lay out a specific plan you have for developing a longer 8-page paper. You are ostensibly planning your final Research Paper in your Proposals, but again, if you decide to change your mind in the future, you will be allowed to use a different topic; consider your Proposal a chance to make sure that you have enough ideas to fill an eight-page paper using your chosen topic. If it turns out that you don’t, then that’s a good sign that you should choose a different topic for your final Research Paper.

Your Proposal will have three distinct parts: Introduction, Discussion, and Conclusion. Please use these subheadings in your Proposal. You may use first or third person in the Proposal. I suggest you use first person and stay with this perspective the entire time.

Your Introduction should layout the topic area and your interest, and what motivated or sparked your interest.

The Discussion (or body) section should discuss what you think you may find out, or what areas you are eager to learn about in your writing and research. At some point in this section, discuss the reading(s) that somehow figured into your proposal and interest. Perhaps they left you with a question or need for further information? You are required to reference at least two essays from our textbooks in this section.

The Conclusion section should list your method of pursuing your topic, step by step. What will you do first, and why? Will you begin writing or researching, or a little of both? Be concrete here. Do not leave the reader guessing. What sorts of writing processes will you follow? How many drafts will you probably make? When and where will you do research? (Be as specific as saying, “I will write two pages of freewriting to think of ideas to research, along with constructing a ten-item list.”) Remember: you are proposing to do a longer, 8-page essay about this topic, so try to propose a realistic approach and method here.

Notes and Reminders

Again, while you are required to pick a topic for this Proposal, it does not have to be the topic you will write on for your final Research Paper (though it of course may be). You are more than welcome to switch to a new topic once we get further into the semester. The larger purpose here is to simply get you to start conceiving of your final essay in a larger fashion, and to prepare you for the kinds of processes that you will have to undertake when you begin writing your major papers in future classes.

Nuts and Bolts

• The Proposal must be two to three pages long (not including your Works Cited). These are hard limits; do not go under or over them.
• You will need a Works Cited for the article(s) you reference.
• Remember to follow the assignment guidelines in your syllabus.
• Your Proposals are due by midnight on Friday, March 27^th.
• As a reminder, I can obviously no longer require printed-out copies of assignments; you will need to send electronic copies of all of your work, and I will have to return comments electronically. The best way for me to do this is to correct your papers using the Track Changes feature in Word. Thus, when you turn in your Proposal, please send it as either a .doc or .docx file (i.e. the standard Word files), although .rtf or .txt will work. Donot send it as a .pdf or as a shared Google Doc or Microsoft OneDrive file (etc.), since I will be unable to use the Track Changes feature. Please attach the file containing your assignment to the email (do not cut and paste the assignment into the body of the email), and write the name of that assignment (i.e. “Proposal”) in the Subject area. I will confirm receipt, grade your assignment, and send you back the file with my comments and your grade.