Tips for Writing the Research Paper
The purpose of this link is to explain to you what my understanding of a literary research paper is and to give you some pointers. If you have no idea how to go about writing this paper, it's doubtful this link can explain it to you. Therefore, you should have some familiarity with writing literary research papers if you write for this class.
The point of the research paper is to enhance our understanding of the text at hand by giving us original thinking that utilizes research. There are a variety of ways to accomplish this goal. However, there are some things you don't want to do. There is no need to go into the author's biography; we do not want to write a summary of the author's life. The paper should not read as a report that is merely a conglomeration of other people's thoughts and ideas. Of course, make sure you provide enough passages from secondary materials. You might write about the cultural, political, or religious environment and so forth that the text originated from as a way to illuminate that text. Again, the focus of your paper should be on the primary text and your paper should not read as a history report containing only superficial and passing relevance to the primary text.
The primary text is one of the works from our syllabus. Make sure that the entire point of your paper is to enhance our understanding of the primary text. Everything in the paper should connect to the primary text and continually refer back to it by using direct quotes. Be sure that the paper does not lose the primary text and its focus on the primary text. Secondary texts are the critical or informative texts you paper uses. We cannot use other texts by the same author as secondary sources. Information from our text doesn't count as a secondary source. In other words, you can only use a primary text from our anthology, not the footnotes, the introductions, the biographies, and so forth.
Your paper should contain a thesis, underlined or italicized, somewhere towards the end of the first paragraph. The thesis is a one sentence concise summary/statement of the paper's final conclusion. The more specific, the better. The thesis should not be a question. However, a question may precede the thesis with the thesis functioning as the answer to that question. The thesis must be something open to debate. Good thesis:" Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra" attempts to reverse feelings of guilt and sin in the American psyche." Bad thesis: Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra" is a powerful poem. What can you argue here? This is pure opinion and depends upon emotive responses. What exactly does "powerful" mean anyway? Bad thesis: This paper will examine feelings of guilt and sin in Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra." We don't want an intent or a plan of action; we need a final conclusion, the big point. You do not need to repeat or rephrase the thesis in the conclusion.
Don't use "I." or make any references to yourself. This is your paper. I will assume ideas this aren't cited belong to you. Hence, don't say, "I feel that Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra" attempts to reverse feelings of guilt and sin in the American psyche." Cut the "I feel," "I think," "In my opinion," "This writer believes that."
Cite all material that is not common knowledge. If nine out of ten average people walking down the street can't answer the question, it's not common knowledge. If in doubt, cite it. That George Washington was first the president of the United States is common knowledge. George Washington's waist size or the name of any siblings he had is not. Yes, you may have to backtrack and find sources you can cite for information that you just picked up somewhere. That's just part of writing a research paper. A quote should not comprise the entirety of a sentence. In other words, the following sentence is a no-no. "Ginsberg admired William Blake's visionary poems" (45). Integrate quotes. Instead, that sentence should look like the next sentence. According to Barry Miles, "Ginsberg admired William Blake's visionary poems" (45). Or you could do this. It is interesting to note that "Ginsberg admired William Blake's visionary poems" (Miles 45). Although I don't have room to develop a sufficient example here, the relevance of quotes to your paper should always be obvious. Yes, you have to give us citations for the primary text also. For prose, use page numbers. For poetry, use line numbers. Also, if you paraphrase something that means you got the information elsewhere, but you put it in your own words. Ginsberg enjoyed the visionary quality of some of William Blake's poems (Miles 45). For both quotes and paraphrases, I need citations at the end of each sentence. If you give quotes in three sentences and each one uses a passage from the same author, I still need an author and page number at the end of each one. Same thing for paraphrasing, otherwise the reader has no idea when the paper paraphrases and when it doesn't.
Those are most of the big things. Here are some smaller things to watch out for:
The title should not be the same as the title of the primary text. It should not be a summary of what the essay is about. In other words, don't use An Examination of Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra" as your title or Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra." The title should not be bolded, underlined, italicized, or enlarged. Just center it and capitalize the first letter of each major word and the first letter in the first word of the title.
Be careful about using quotes that are too long and that you do not mix in with your own words. Let's look at an example.
This is not what you want to do with a long quote:
In "The Culture of Consumerism," Juliet Schor discusses the subject of consumerism. "Oddly, it doesn't seem as if we're spending wastefully, or even lavishly. Rather, many of us feel we're just making it, barely able to stay even. But what's remarkable is that this feeling is not restricted to families of limited income" (255).
*Be sure that a quote never constitutes the entire sentence. Integrate the quotes with your own words.
This is what you want to do with a long quote:
In "The Culture of Consumerism," Juliet Schor discusses the subject of consumerism. According to Schor, "oddly, it doesn't seem as if we're spending wastefully, or even lavishly" (255). Moreover, "many of us feel we're just making it, barely able to stay even" (255). "What's remarkable is that this feeling is not restricted to families of limited income," she concludes (255).
Also, by splitting up the quotes, you can now insert some of your own commentary between the lines:
In "The Culture of Consumerism," Juliet Schor discusses the subject of consumerism. According to Schor, "oddly, it doesn't seem as if we're spending wastefully, or even lavishly" (255). Although we may spend a lot of money on things we don’t need, Schor believes that we see these expenditure as necessities. Moreover, "many of us feel we're just making it, barely able to stay even" (255). In this sense, much of the American public defines getting by not as being able to satisfy the basic needs of clothing, food, and shelter but as being able to buy the next trendy item, the latest pair of designer jeans, a pair of popular sunglasses. In short, we often confuse desire with need. "What's remarkable is that this feeling is not restricted to families of limited income," she concludes (255). Thus, the sense of not having enough is not based on income level. Instead, this feeling of always needing more affects everyone.
Be specific. Give examples. Back up what you say. Don't assume the reader will automatically agree with you.
Each paragraph should be begin with a topic sentence that operates as the thesis for the paragraph. Everything in that paragraph should relate to the topic sentences, and, in turn, all topic sentences should relate to the thesis.
Watch out for the usual suspects: fragments, splices, and run-ons.
Make sure you spellcheck and proofread it. A few errors usually make it through (they certainly tend to in my writing anyway). If I feel that someone hasn't even taken the time to spellcheck the paper, it's difficult for me to give the paper a confident reading and a favorable assessment. Watch our for homonyms, "their" and "there," and be careful of things spellcheck won't catch. Is we consider this fairly, we must conclude that . . . Obviously I mean "if" not "is."
It's=it is. Its = possessive as in "the dog has its ball." English is an odd language.
Be careful of passive voice, which means having an action without a doer (mistakes were made) or placing the subject after the verb (mistakes were made by him). Just say, "he made mistakes." Note that an imperative or command sentence isn't passive voice as the subject is always you, even if you isn't mentioned. Pay attention now.
Titles of stories, poems, and articles go in quotation marks. Books, movies, plays, and really long poems are underlined or italicized (that's passive voice, isn't it?).
Pronoun reference. When a person goes to the store, they usually spend money. Wait! "A person" is singular. "They" is plural (hold on. Why did I use "is" if "they" is/are plural? I refer to "they" as a word (singular) not "they" as a collective entity of two or more living beings (plural)). English has no third-person, plural, gender neutral pronoun, so we sometimes use "they." That is wrong. Just use "he or she." When a person goes to the store, he or she usually spends money.
Don't use too little research. I wish I could give you an equation or a ratio of your words to that of the primary text to those of the primary materials, but none exists that I am aware of.
Some form of be + gerund (ing) verb. Look for phrase such as "is saying," "was meaning,"does begin," and so on. Make them "says," "meant," and "begins."
Put this paper in present tense as much as possible. In other words, use "Ginsberg writes," not "Ginsberg wrote." Yes, I am aware that he is dead.
Exclamation points should be used sparingly, if at all, I think. I think you should use exclamation points sparingly, if it all. You should use exclamation points sparingly, if at all. If you don't understand the differences among these three sentences, reread this link until you do.
Attention procrastinators! The best way to sink your own ship is to wait until the last minute. Turn the TV off. Leave you dirty laundry in a pile for another week. Skip someone else's class.
P.S. For those of you who think this should be done another way (or have done it another way) and that I have passed beyond the pale, be the better person, humor me in my madness, and do as I have requested.