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Writing Ethnicity, Spring 2007 Your work this semester will culminate with a term paper of 10-12 pages on a subject you design yourself. Feel free to connect this project to issues raised in other courses in addition to this one, and to take this as an opportunity to explore important aspects of your area of concentration. Regardless of the subject and approach you choose, you must develop an original argument, and I will be looking for a thesis statement that shows your ability to synthesize and even quarrel intelligently with outside sources rather than relying on others for authority. The work should build on at least five outside sources. As part of the process of developing the term paper, you will be writing a prospectus and annotated bibliography. The prospectus is essentially a plan for the work you intend to do in the term paper. It gives some background on the question you’re interested in exploring, suggests why that question deserves attention, and offers a tentative working thesis. It should also provide a working title for the project. Consider the prospectus as having two goals – first, defining the project for yourself, and second, demonstrating to others that you can carry out the project you suggest. For our purposes, the prospectus should be about two pages long and accompanied by an annotated bibliography. I would like to see a bibliography of at least three sources (note that the final project requires five), formatted in MLA style, each source annotated with a paragraph summarizing the source. We will do several workshops related to this project in its multiple stages during the rest of the semester. |