Mr. Nesbitt
ENC 1102-07
Mr. Nesbitt
24 June 2001

[Note this sample may not have quite the specificity of your project as it is a modified excerpt taken from my dissertation, which gives a broad consideration of communicative and transportative technology and the various reactions of writers from several centuries and several continents to such technology]

Bone Machines: Industrialism, Hotrods, Hypertextuality, and Terminal Velocity in American Literature

[Notice that the title is two-part. The first part is creative. The second part lets the reader know what the paper covers. Your title need not be two-part, but it should be creative. For purposes of a sample prospectus, I should develop a more specific title.]

"Fierce-throated Beauty:" Whitmans' Ambivalence Towards Technology

A thundering train rips throw the blue mountain countryside sending bluebirds screaming into the gauze-like mists. Nearby a young writer breaks her sharp pencil in half and curses as her concentration breaks and ebbs away. Immediately, she picks up half of her pencil and scribbles a poem about the destructiveness and noisiness of trains. Such a scene illustrates the intrusiveness of technology, in this case manifested in the form of the steam train, that all writers have dealt and continue to deal with in their writing. Like this imaginary writer, many real writers have also taken stands either for or against locomotives. For example, Leo Marx in his The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964) points out that Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804-1864) "The Celestial Railroad" (1833) is "a wonderfully compact satire on the prevailing faith in progress," (27) which "turns upon the idea of the news machine as a vehicle for an illusory voyage of salvation" (27). In contrast to Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) welcomes industrialism and the factory system, in broad terms, and the railroad, in specific. Marx relates that Emerson "regards the news technology as an auspicious sign of the times" (231) that will help a developing America feed itself (231). In Marx's opinion, Emerson considers that railroad as "an instrument of national unity," (234) which will "annihilate distance" (234) and weave "the various threads of American life into one vast web" (234). Emerson concludes that "railroad iron is a magician's rod" (234). Unlike Walt Whitman's (1819-1892) aforementioned contemporaries, his writing reflects his own unsettled feelings regarding the locomotive. His poem is a bipolar meditation about the steam train, and ultimately, neither the narrator nor the poem attempts to reconcile its differences and tensions.
[There are a lot of things to note about this introductory paragraph. I do not slam the thesis against the reader's head; I gradually build up to it. The essay begins with an interesting, comparatively speaking, passage, and then comments on the significance of that passage in a way that introduces the general topic to the reader (Incidentally, I could also have begun the essay in a number of other way, such as with a quote or a statistic about trains or Walt Whitman for example). Then, the essay begins to limit the broad topic of trains and writers to a handful of writers, and then limits this field of topics to one writer.
Finally, the essay focuses down to a single poem by a single writer. From here on, the essay will concern itself with only this one poem.
Notice that I weave quotes from secondary sources with own words; I don't quote long, secondary passages, not comment on them, and then jump to the next topic. No quote comprises a sentence on its own.
Also, I do not begin each sentence with "according to Marx." Instead, I use transitional devices such as "unlike," "however," "also," "moreover." In an effort to vary word choice, I use phrases such as "steam train," "railroad," and "locomotive" instead of constantly repeating the word train.
At no time do I use the first-person or the passive voice, and the thesis limits itself to a single sentence.]

In "To a Locomotive in Winter," Whitman offers a portrait of the locomotive in lively, positive, almost erotic imagery. "Type of the modern-emblem of motion and power-pulse of the continent" (13) Whitman exclaims of the locomotive. In the second section of the poem, Whitman describes the trains as a "Fierce-throated beauty!" (18) with "lawless music" (19) and "madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all" (20). With this description, Whitman proclaims the Locomotive as an almost archetypal symbol, a sublime force of nature. He asserts this idea when he says that the locomotive is (a) "law of thyself complete" (21). The last image he gives of the locomotive is of it "unpent and glad and strong" (25) beneath "the free skies" (25) after it is launched o'er the prairies wide" (21). Thus, by the poem's end, Whitman leaves the reader with an odd tension in the poem: the locomotive, a mechanical device, has somehow becomes a sort of natural, organic symbol for an almost primitive force.

Robert W. French, in his "Music for a Mad Scene" (1981), notes the contrasting thematic discontinuities that the poem displays. Whitman divides his poem "into two sections of unequal length, lines 1-17 and 18-25" (32). French observes that "the differences are such that each section could stand by itself as a separate poem [. . .] and it would not be evident that the two belonged together other than as a study in contrasts" (32). French maintains that "it is necessary for any full reading of 'To a Locomotive in Winter' to attempt to reconcile the basic conceptual differences that the poem appears to present" (32). These two differences, according to French, are the opposing portraits that the narrator paints of the train; in the first section, the train "is an emblem of coherence and harmony," (34) but in the second section "it has an existence beyond human control" (35). Thus, the poem replicates, to some degree, an interesting binary of control/freedom. While French believes that the poem admits a conception "of the locomotive as a creative force" (36), such a reading is only possible if the reader divorces the context of the second section from the first. Ultimately, the two trains of the poem might stand for any two contrasting states or binaries-life/death, love/hate, or perhaps even two sides of Whitman's own personality and his clashing feelings about technology or art.
[Notice in these paragraphs that I use strong topic sentences and everything in the paragraph relates to the topic sentence. Reread your own paragraphs and make sure that the paragraph does not being to stray from its intent. Also, the last sentence of each paragraph begins a transition into the next paragraph that the next paragraph's topic sentence completes.
Again, I chop the quotes up and blend them in with my own words. Note that I am not just summarizing the article. Instead, I an analyzing, comment on it, and synthesizing it into my essay. In some places, I even disagree with or correct it The conclusion is a bit short, as this excerpt wasn't meant to be an essay in its own right. However, I did not restate or rephrase the conclusion, although the last few sentences resonate with, without echoing, the idea of the thesis. Do not use "in conclusion." A more subtle phrase such as "finally," or "ultimately" signals to the reader that the essay is drawing to a close].
Works Cited [Not Bibliography]

Primary Sources [these are the works by your writer. Such sources cannot comprise the whole of your paper; you must have secondary sources as well. In many instances, you will have only one primary source]

Whitman, Walt. "To a Locomotive in Winter." Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia; Dacid McKay, c. 1900. Bartleby. 24 June 20001 .

Secondary Sources [these are the critical resources you use in your paper. By "critical" I mean works, not by your author, that in some way comment on, explain, or otherwise discuss your writers. "Critical" does not necessarily mean criticize. These secondary sources should far outweigh the primary sources.]

French, Walter. "Music for a Mad Scene: A Reading of 'To a Locomotive in Winter.'" Walt Whitman Review 27.1 (1981): 32-9.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1964.

[Notice all listing are alphabetized by last name within their respective categories, each ends with a period, I have given full names of all articles and books, and university press is UP.
Also, I read the entire article, which I found through MLA. The book I already knew about. I looked for both the author and the title of the poem in the index, and read those pages. Although I later went back and read the entire book, it is not necessary or efficient to read an entire book for use in a research paper. The index, the table of contents, and the introduction to the book, are your friends.]

[A final word: This prospectus may be lacking some fundamental elements such as page numbers because I may or may not know the HTML code. Make sure your prospectus is at least two pages and does have important details such as page numbers, proper paragraph indentation, 12 pt. Times New Roman, and one-inch margins. The citations should be indented one time after every line following the first. Also, the brackets are to remind me of things to point out and to refresh your memory when you are reading this document outside of class. You will not include such brackets detailing your compositional process in your prospectus].