– The five-paper minimum means five full pages – a cover page does not count as one of these pages, nor does a reference page, and getting a paragraph onto the fifth page does not count as a full page.

– You should use double spacing, a common font, and size 12 font size

– You should have a reference page – you don’t have to include your annotated bibliography, but include all the sources you used.

– Here’s a guide for how to cite different types of sources – notably, don’t simply post a URL without giving the title, author (if any), etc. – http://www.citationmachine.net/mla/cite-a-website; you can use either Chicago or MLA style

– You should have citations from your sources in your paper whenever you are using information that you gained from these sources. Do not use any direct quotes or working from the articles without placing them in quotation marks and citing where you got the quotes. Otherwise this is a clear case of plagiarism. Summarizing someone else’s argument or rewording it is likewise something for which you need to provide a citation.

– In your introductory section you should have some sort of statement aimed at the reader that states clearly what you are going to be doing in the paper. Don’t simply jump into the paper – let the reader know what to generally expect from your approach, and there’s no need to hint at your conclusion. Ex. “In this paper I will be examining the issue/problem of X. I will do so by examining elements of this issues including A, B and C.”

– Have clear sections in your paper – I already suggested that you divide the main part into three sub-sections. If, for instance, you were writing a paper on the expansion of Nascar’s audience , you might write, “In this paper I will be examining a transition in the audience for NASCAR by focusing on 1) Nascar’s efforts to attract females, 2) Nascar’s efforts to attract African Americans, and 3) Nascar’s strategies on social media. Then proceed to write a bit about the background of the issue – its founding, that Nascar was traditionally a largely white, male, Southern audience, and that more recently it’s grown, and then proceed to the main section. After going over the three subsections, then have a conclusion.

Basic information

The term paper, which should be a minimum of five full pages long (not including a cover or bibliography pages) and is due during the last week of regular class, is your opportunity to apply some of the ideas that you’ve learned about popular culture in this course, and apply these insights to a topic that you want to investigate.

The main idea behind the paper is to investigate how a particular cultural issue has changed over time – earlier in the course we saw dramatic examples in the articles about Shakespeare and Boston. I certainly don’t expect anything on the scale of those, but instead want you to discover some of the basic processes underlying cultural change.

You can look at things such as new trends, the emergence and transformation of subcultures, how the cultural status of various phenomenon change over time—in other words a very wide variety of topics, and I hope that you’ll be imaginative in picking them. Please consider choosing something that you’re very interested in rather than simply picking something from the suggested list below!

The topic is on extreme makeup and the sources are attached in the annotated bib.