The Research Paper

Context: Over the course of this semester, you have been investigating, through various modes of analysis, a single culture. You have also been writing, one essay at a time, the components for a research paper. A research paper is an expanded essay that presents your own interpretation or evaluation or argument. When you write an essay, you use everything that you personally know and have thought about a subject. When you write a research paper you build upon what you know about the subject and make a deliberate attempt to find out what experts know. A research paper involves surveying a field of knowledge in order to find the best possible information in that field.

Assignment: Having already conducted the research and composed the essential pieces of your research paper, you will now begin assembling those pieces so that they reflect a cohesive whole. In order to achieve this, you will need to

• Combine your component essays
• Create a single thesis that logically follows from your research and analysis,
• Add multiple transitions throughout the essay so that the reader can more easily navigate your, now much longer, essay,
• Compose a new introduction and conclusion so that they are reflective of your new essay’s thesis and argument, and
• Edit your final draft for clarity and precision, making use of the various sentence-level devices we have considered throughout the semester:
  • very-short sentences,
  • freighting sentences,
  • super literalism, simile,
  • proctalepsis,
  • exemplum,
  • distinctio, and
  • parallelism.

Target Length and Formatting: The target length for this essay is 10 pages. As this is the final essay, it is imperative that you demonstrate competence in the conventions of college-level writing, including MLA format. Failure to adhere to conventions of MLA format will result in loss of points. If you have any questions about how to properly format your paper, including the works cited page, please refer to the Purdue OWL MLA Sample Paper (Links to an external site.).

Writing Process: You will not be turning in the individual steps of the writing and revision process, but I do encourage you to systematically work through the process. Remember that to adequately engage in the revision and proofreading process, you will need to have a near-final draft some days before the actual due date. Failure to thoroughly revise and proofread will result in reduced grades. Remember, this paper represents your ability to write at a college-level. Let this essay serve as proof that you are ready to be successful in your future academic writing assignments.