Research Paper Assignment Description

Overview

The second piece of writing that you will do for this class is a research paper. This paper will build upon the work you have already begun in the bibliography and is intended to help you develop your ideas for the purpose of writing a better film critique later in the semester. The paper must be between 1200 and 1500 words, double-spaced with a reasonable font size, and all citations must be in MLA or Chicago style format.

What is this assignment?

This assignment is quite a bit different than the film critique that many of you have done for my classes before. It is intended to help you sharpen your ideas about a film’s historical accuracy and thus make the film paper a little easier. A research paper is simply a presentation of the research you’ve done over a topic or set of topics. For example, since we are watching Gladiator, let’s say you had a bibliography with books and articles on how gladiators actually lived and fought, the technology available at the time, the buildings in Rome in the 2nd century, and some of the people depicted in the film like Commodus or Marcus Aurelius. For the research paper you would go back to that bibliography and find the sources that were the most helpful for you and use those sources to write a paper explaining those things. This paper should have an introduction, telling me what you are writing about, followed by a series of body paragraphs explaining all your research to me, and finally a conclusion. You don’t have to critique any of these sources, all you have to do is tell me what they say in your own words and in an essay you have constructed. Your main job is to string together a presentation of the information you’ve learned concerning whatever topics you chose to research. For example you might have a paragraph about architecture and/ or the arena, another paragraph on the Marcus Aurelius or Commodus, and maybe a final one how gladiators lived and fought. Please remember that this is all leading up to a critique of the film, so make sure you are looking at things that have some part in the film. For example, it would be pretty useless to do research on Rome’s wars with Parthia. All I’m trying to say is help yourself and choose things for your research that have some relevance for the film we’re watching.

Important Things to Remember

Due Date: 11/5/17; submit via dropbox in the course Momentum site

1200 minimum (you can certainly write more)

All direct quotes must be properly cited and all paraphrases must be properly cited. Your work here is to put all this research together, but for this assignment most of what you will be writing will be the research of others, so you probably have a lot of citations in the paper. Failure to properly cite your sources in the paper will result in a lower grade and plagiarism will result in a 0 for the assignment.

You need to use at least ten of the sources from your bibliography assignment for this paper and at least seven of them must be from the library’s databases. You already have these sources in your bibliography, so the idea here is to build on what you have already done for a stronger paper.

I DO NOT want to know what an academic critic or another professional critic thought about the film. This warning includes director/ cast and crew commentaries. You may use these to get ideas, but they cannot be used as sources for this paper.