Research paper

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As stated in the first lesson, by the end of the course you will have produced a portfolio that contains several research activities, including a bibliography related to your research paper, an introduction that reviews source material, a draft of your paper, and a revised research paper. The process will involve the following steps:

• select a topic developed in one of the essays written for Lessons 2, 3 or 4
• determine which research resources address your topic of study
• gather those sources in a way that allows you to hear the various “threads of conversation” taking place within your topic
• create a bibliography that includes ten sources, five of which are annotated
• write a paragraph describing how you will use the sources in your paper
• formulate an introduction that includes a review of source material
• write the 2500-3500 word research paper that incorporates at least six sources from your bibliography
• review comments offered in the Peer Review
• compose a revised research paper

You should assume that your audience has familiarity with the work and that your primary audience includes your classmates and instructor. A potential secondary audience includes the scholars who may be interested in your contributions to the literary body of knowledge.

 

This unit focuses on developing the research project. For this section, you will complete a short, annotated bibliography and write a six- to eight-page research paper.

This unit assumes that you have a basic understanding of the technical aspects of research, such as evaluating and documenting sources. If you are still uncertain about those procedures, please review mechanics of research and the online sources.

• The University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center offers a good discussion of annotated bibliographieshttp://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/AnnotatedBibliography.html.
• Cornell University also provides help with annotated bibliographies.
• Northwestern University http://www.writing.northwestern.edu/avoiding_plagiarism.html. offers a discussion of plagiarism and paraphrasing
• Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/index.html offers a wealth of information on researching and documenting sources.

Although the research process is not mechanical, it is nevertheless necessary that you follow the mechanics of research and the MLA documentation guidelines.

 

While conducting research, you should move back and forth between the general and the specific. You might begin research by viewing general discussions of the topic found in encyclopedias, bibliographies, and reference materials specific to the discipline. The information found in these resources provides an overview of the topic and immerses you in the ways of thinking and writing about the chosen topic. This overview material may also be used at the beginning of the research paper to offer your audience a general introduction to the topic.

You then should move from the general resources to the more specialized material in scholarly books and journals. These sources represent the threads of academic conversation that typically occur among academics. The more recent the publication, the more recent the conversational thread.

For example, a 1960s New Critical approach might have focused on form and symmetry in William Blake’s poetry because this type of approach was current in 1960s. However, in the 1980s, the same poetry might have been viewed through a feminist or deconstructionist lens. While being current is not necessarily an end in itself, it is important to know what is being said and what has been said.

Moving back and forth between general and specialized sources is a continuous process. In your research you will cite specialized resources and participate with your sources in a conversation. Because you will also be writing to classmates and your instructor, you will want to be familiar with general perspectives, even though the general background material will not constitute major sources of your research.

The purpose of your first assignment is to help you begin engaging in a conversation about your research. Even though your research has only begun, it is important to get into the habit of using writing to think through your topic. For this reason, you need to write WHILE you research rather than AFTER you have done your research.

 

Everyone may have an opinion, but not all opinions are equal, and some opinions may be of little or no value. Your English professor’s opinion regarding optimum strategic oil reserves may not be worth the time you take listening. On the other hand, your English professor’s comments on writing and literature deserve a great deal of attention. You need to consider the source of information and the quality of that source.

Not all interpretations of a text are created equally. Some sources offer highly reasoned arguments and strong evidence for their claims, while others offer broad opinions with little supporting evidence. Part of your task in conducting research is to evaluate potential sources so that your research essay uses only the strongest sources.

The research paper is your opportunity to enter more fully into the conversation that surrounds your topic. So far, you have gathered sources and organized them. As part of your annotated bibliography, you listed the sources and wrote paragraphs that established some relationships among the sources. Now, use at least five of your sources in a draft of a paper that focuses on ONE of the threads of conversation that you identified. 
A research paper is not a broad summary of research or overview of various elements in the literature being researched. For that reason, it is crucial that you narrow your topic and focus your research on one aspect of the work. As you consider your sources in light of your narrowed topic, you may rely on the following questions as prompts:

• Do you agree or disagree with the other scholars?
• What do you agree with or disagree with in their research?
• What claim* (See URL) might you make?
• What are your reasons for the claim?
• What evidence from the text would you provide?
• What counter-arguments might you anticipate?
• How will you address these counter-arguments?

A humanities-based research paper often follows this format:

1. Introduction
2. Literature review
3. Theoretical approach that offers a different perspective
4. Writer’s arguments
5. The writer’s refutation of counter-arguments

While you may consider following another model offered in your text or in the Web Links sites, you have already completed much of the work for the format above. You have a rough draft of the literature review in the material in your 
Portfolio Bibliography. Similarly, your answers to the above questions will help you formulate your argument and refute counter-arguments.

If you have not done so already, write your claim, reasons and evidence now. Your claim and reasons will function as the thesis of your paper. You may also identify a particular theoretical approach that supports your claim. The evidence you use to support your argument will be selections from the text and the scholarly sources in the bibliography.

 

Portfolio Research Paper

By the date indicated on the course calendar, submit your completed research paper as Portfolio Research Paper.

The paper will be 2500-3000 words in length. Once you have submitted the research paper, you have completed ENGLISH 1102 ONLINE.

 

I hope the course has been as enjoyable and challenging an experience for you as it has been for me.

Essay1

Language and choice of wording is always the key to writing an engaging essay. The attitude the writer has determines what the readers think of the story and how they follow along with the theme. In this case “On Going Home” by Joan Didion has a variety of approaches towards her feelings and attitude during the experience of her trip going home after a period of time. This trip is filled with emotion, confusion and excitement as her family sees her one year old daughter for her first birthday. The detailed accounts of situations that Joan notices are what make this essay memorable, such as pointing out her husband’s misunderstandings with her family. Joan’s constant attitude changes and the way detailed acts are described successfully portray the experience in the manner she wants the readers to understand them.

Realizing that an issue is there goes towards her favor, most of the time people with problems never submit to acknowledging the issue and always neglect it. In this case Joan understands that she has been living a double life. Although it is never mentioned that she dislikes her current living situation, it can be inferred that she prefers the similarities in living with her family in the environment she was raised. The essay is started off in a comical sense of writing comparing her husband’s traits to her family’s traditions. “My brother does not understand my husbands inability to perceive the advantage in the rather common real-estate transaction known as “sale-leaseback,” and my husband in turn does not understand why so many of the people he hears about in my fathers house have recently been committed to mental hospitals or booked on drunk-driving charges.” (Didion 620) says Joan while comparing and contrasting the differences in traits between her husband and brother while maintaining an uplifted attitude.

Emotion comes into play when the author begins comparing herself with herself, and what this means is that her satisfaction with her current life has not been meeting how she really desires to carry out her lifestyle. This can be seen in her language throughout the majority of the story but what precisely pictures her changing emotion is when she states “I had by all objective accounts a “normal” and a “happy” family situation, and yet I was almost thirty years old before I could talk to my family on the telephone without crying after I had hung up.” (620) This shows the reality of how much this is affecting her attitude towards herself, her husband, daughter and even her affection towards her direct family. This then translates into her visitation to a family graveyard in a nearby city and realizes that it has been vandalized since the last time she was there. Later on “Once home I mention the broken monuments in the graveyard. My mother shrugs,” (621) says Joan with despair. What can be taken from this experience and a possible reason she put this into her writing is to portray that what she once found important in her life (family) is now crumbling away and that she (as a mother) is now progressively adapting to unwanted changes in her life.

Overall Joan’s constant attitude changes and the way detailed acts are described, successfully portray the experience in the manner she wants the readers to understand them. Through her trials and acknowledgements of the issues that are being suffered, she has dedicated change for the good of her newly one-year-old daughter. The attitudes towards life have been tested but through challenge a greater outcome will arise. Being in the responsible role of a mother pushes her desires aside for the benefit of the child. At least she can “promise to tell her a funny story” (613)

Work Cited

Didion, Joan. “On Going Home.” Literature for Composition: Essays, Stories, Poems, and Plays. By Sylvan Barnet, William Burto, and William E. Cain. Boston: Longman, 2011. 619-21. Print.

Essay2

Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “I Fell in Love, or My Hormones Awakened” is one of several short stories and poems in Ortiz’s book “Silent Dancing:

 

A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood”.  The story stands alone by itself but it is better understood in relations to Cofer’s other works.  The thesis can be presented that while there are deep cultural undertones in this story, in reality, there are more cultural commonalties than distinctions.  As the title suggests, a young girl thinks she has fallen in love.  The boy of her affections, however, hardly knows she exists.  Never-the-less, he does manage to steal a kiss and add one more notch to his long list of conquests.

 

Cofer is Puerto Rican and many of her stories in this book and others focus on the Puerto Rican experience.  In “I Fell in Love, or My Hormones Awakened” the young girl that is portrayed is likely Cofer herself.  The story is written in first person and Cofer has acknowledged at several different times that her work is often a merging of truth and fiction.  It is partially autobiographical but is it also partially a product of her vivid imagination.  In this story she lives in what is described as a high-rise barrio.  Her family’s neighbors are primarily other Puerto Ricans and Latinos.  The neighborhood is in many ways isolated from the mainstream world yet it is still very much a part of that world.

 

The father of the young girl in “I Fell in Love, or My Hormones Awakened” is certainly a part of the outside world.  He, just as Cofer’s actual father did, serves in the US Navy.  The girl, once proud of her father and his military service, has fallen prey to her raging hormones in more than one way.  She is so focused on the boy, an Italian boy at that, she neglects her own family.  Indeed, she even shuns them and is embarrassed by them.  Her friends too are neglected as the girl focuses all of her energies into gazing longingly at the boy who barely knows she is there.

 

The infatuation described in “I Fell in Love, or My Hormones Awakened” is not a positive thing.  Despite her traditional Puerto Rican upbringing, an upbringing that emphasizes chastity, self esteem, and devotion to family, the girl is willing to give up anything just to earn the boy’s attention.  She is rigidified by the fact that the boy is not Puerto Rican and that he is, in her eyes at least, rich.  His father owns and operates the “English” grocery store in the neighborhood and the family invests money into the school the neighborhood children attend.  She sees herself as inferior to him.

 

There are many reasons that the girl should turn away from the boy but she cannot bring herself to do so.  This is true despite the fact that the boy proves to be not worthy of young love.  He slumps around the neighborhood and school acting as though he is disinterested in everything around him.  At times he is even belligerent to his teachers and other adults. Still, the girl adores him.  It is only when he takes something from her and then turns away towards a new conquest that she finally comes to her senses.

 

The focus “I Fell in Love, or My Hormones Awakened” has on Puerto Rican culture actually almost fades in comparison to the focus it places on young love in.  That, quite likely, is Cofer’s intent.  Regardless of culture, human behavior has some basic commonalities.  Young love, or what Cofer more aptly identifies as raging hormones, can have many deleterious effects regardless of culture.  The girl in the story certainly suffers from those effects.  Unfortunately, so too do her family, friends, and other acquaintances.

 

Essay3

Steven Doloff’s “The Opposite Sex” was first published in the January 13, 1983 edition of the Washington Post.  Doloff presented an intriguing assignment to his students.  He wanted them to imagine themselves in the shoes of the opposite sex.  Doloff wanted the students to focus on what might happen to them in a one day period of they were a male verses a female or vice versa.  The students were asked to record their perceptions of that imaginary experience in an essay.  The results were interesting to say the least.  They were also exactly what would have been expected by anyone cognizant of the stereotypical views of gender and inherent inequalities between the sexes that still drive our world.

One of the first obvious reflections that indeed our views of gender are very much stereotyped is that females more so than males were more eager to complete the essay.  Males, in contrast put it off as long as they could.  Could it be that males recognized that they inherently hold a superior societal position when compared to females?  Could it be that not only did males want to imagine themselves being anything “less” than they already were but they also didn’t want to subject themselves to the possibility of being considered effeminate or possibly even homosexual as a result of an essay? Dollof’s article really didn’t explore these possibilities but there was obviously some factor(s) at play that made females more eager than males to temporarily switch gender roles at least in their imaginations!  

As might be expected, when males did resign themselves to participating in Dollof’s experiment, they often wrote of women in a domestic role cooking and cleaning their homes and otherwise caring for their families.  Dinner, after all, had to be on the table when the man of the household walked through the door every evening!   Alternatively, male essay writers sometimes presented their day in the life of a single woman, a woman’s whose primary focus in life was getting someone to take her out and wine and dine her!  The male expectation of being rewarded for being a ready escort even occasionally slipped through the essays!  Males (presenting themselves as females) wrote about slamming the door in their escort’s face at the end of every evening’s excursion.  In other words, these males viewed females as being out to get something free and males as being willing to provide the “something” as long as they were rewarded in the end!

Females, of course, harbored their own stereotypical images of what it was to be a male verses a female in our world.  Females typically viewed the male life as more exciting and free wheeling.  Instead of presenting themselves as males laboring away to bring a paycheck home to their families, females wrote of their male personas as engaging in exciting sports activities, having no curfews and always being on the prowl for a female to entertain themselves with.  The underlying goal in this form of entertainment was sexual in most instances.  Indeed, some females even wrote of their imaginary exploits as men who completed one sexual liaison after another.

There were, in all, many interesting correlations that emerged with Dollof’s essay assignment.  First, males wrote more reluctantly and only produced essays when they were nearing the due date.  Females, in contrast, began their essays early and even wrote more than did their male counterparts.  Female students writing these essays also seemed to be inherently more aware that the world was driven by stereotypes and inequalities.    They even made direct observations about the male gender having “physical and social privileges” that the female gender simply does not have (Dollof 437).  

What became clear in Dollof’s experiment was that even today we are bound by certain stereotypes regarding gender roles.  Dollof concluded that we are “burdened with sexist stereotypes and sexist self-images” (438). Indeed, it is these stereotypes that form our ideas of who we are in regard to the rest of the world.  While many are eager to expose them, not so many are willing to take the steps needed to eradicate them!  In one respect it might be argued that gender stereotypes are precisely what form gender gender roles.  They reflect society’s expectation of what males should act like as opposed to what females should act like. 

In the past society’s imposition of gender roles was sometimes one enforced with physical and economic strength.  While women are still physically different than men and have certain physical limitations, in other words women aren’t likely to successfully slug it out to effect change, women have made many inroads towards the eventual accomplishment of societal equality.  Yes, there are still economic factors that sometimes keep women subdued but there too women are making progress.  A very important result of Dollof’s experiment was that women and men alike were always eager to return to their own respective genders once the experiment was over.  That fact alone attests to the fact that, despite the lingering problems that must be overcome to effect true equality, women still want to be women.