English Composition 2

The Research Paper   

This long page presents important information about the Research Paper assignment; please read this page carefully. It would be a good idea to read or reread the various sections of this page when you are approaching the time when the information becomes relevant to the stage you are at as you work on your Research Paper. This assignment page is divided into several sections, outlined below:

  1. Due Dates
  2. The Research Paper Assignment
  3. Sample Research Papers

  4. Step 1: Deciding on your Subject and General Approach
  5. Step 2: Researching your Subject and Preparing an Annotated Bibliography (Due by the beginning of the class period, Wednesday, March 23)
  6. Step 3: Focusing your Approach and Preparing a Topic Proposal (Due by the end of the class period, Wednesday, March 23)
  7. Step 4: Researching and Taking Notes (At least 30 notes due by the beginning of the class period, Wednesday, March 30)
  8. Step 5: Preparing an Outline (Due by the beginning of the class period, Wednesday, April 6)
  9. Step 6: Writing a Draft of your Research Paper (Draft of the Research Paper (at least 1800 words) due at the beginning of the class period, Wednesday, April 13)
  10. Step 7: Revising and Proofreading your Research Paper (Revised draft of the Research Paper (at least 2500 words) due by the end of the day, Saturday, April 23)

  11. Using, Citing, and Documenting Sources
  12. Tips for Writing a Successful Research Paper
  13. Evaluation Criteria and Additional Suggestions for the Research Paper

1. Due Dates

Wednesday, April 13: Draft of at least 1800 words due for peer critique by the beginning of the class period (Three percentage points are deducted from the Research Paper grade if a peer critique draft of the required length is not submitted by the time it is due.)

Saturday, April 23: Final Draft of at least 2500 words due by the end of the day

2. The Research Paper Assignment

The Research Paper is a paper of at least 2500 words with one of the short stories below as your subject.

You will take one or more of the following general approaches to the story, which are explained on pages 1296-97 of the Mays textbook:

For more information about these general approaches to literature, see "20.1 Types of Essays and Sources" on pages 1295-97 of the Mays book.    

In addition to the short story that is the focus of the paper, the Research Paper must include supporting material from at least seven secondary sources. Including the short story, then, you will need at least eight sources for your paper. Information from both the story and the secondary sources must be cited and documented properly in the paper according to MLA standards. Important: You can use only certain types of secondary sources for the Research Paper. See the "Doing Research" section of this page for more information about the kinds of secondary sources to use.

The Research Paper must include a "Works Cited" page listing bibliographic information for the story and the secondary sources, following proper MLA standards. The minimum length requirement of 2500 words includes the "Works Cited" page.

Important Notes

3. Sample Research Papers

4. Step 1: Deciding on your Subject and General Approach

Your first step is to decide on which one of the following stories will be the subject of your Research Paper:

We will discuss all of the stories, and the discussion comments should help you decide which story to make the subject of your paper. You will be spending a lot of time with the story, so consider carefully which story might work the best for you.

You will also need to decide on your general approach to the story:

It is likely that your paper will blend together two or even all three of the approaches, but it is best to make one of the approaches the primary focus of your paper. More information about these general approaches can be found in "20.1 Types of Essays and Sources" on pages 1295-97 of the Mays book.

IVCC's Jacobs Library has an excellent resource that can help you decide on both the story for your paper and your general approach to it. That resource is Gale Ebooks.

The library databases require a login and password.

Each Gale resource linked below presents biographical information about the author, a summary of the story, an explanation of some of the themes of the story, information about the cultural and historical context for the story, and a critical overview. As you read the information about the stories, be alert for anything that you think could give you a good approach to the story. For example, maybe there is something occurring in society at the time of the story that you think is interesting, or maybe there is a particular theme of the story that you think could be a strong topic for your paper.

Please look carefully at the following resources to help give yourself a good sense of which story and what general approach to it might work best for you:

5. Step 2: Researching your Subject and Preparing an Annotated Bibliography

Due by the beginning of the class period, Wednesday, March 23.

Important: The Annotated Bibliography does not receive a grade. However, because creating the bibliography is an important step in your work on the Research Paper assignment, the Research Paper grade will be reduced by three percentage points if the bibliography is not submitted, if it is submitted late, or if it is far below the requirements or expectations for the assignment.

After you have decided on the story and your general approach to it, it is time to begin researching your subject. Your research at this point will help you better understand your subject, will help you determine a more specific approach to the story for your paper, and will help you identify resources that you can return to as you begin taking notes for your paper.

It is easy to find many online sources for the stories. If you type the title of the story into Google, you will find thousands of matches. The problem is that the great majority of these sources--probably ninety-five percent or more--are not good enough to use in a college-level research paper. You will find sources such as online study guides (such as Cliff's Notes), encyclopedia entries, the story itself, comments on the work posted to discussion forums, websites created by high school students as class projects, and essays written by high school and college students and then posted to websites that provide the essays for students to plagiarize. All of these are not credible or scholarly enough for your paper. Because of the problems with so many online sources, and to help prevent you from wasting precious time searching through many bad sources, we have restrictions on the kinds of sources that you can use in your research paper.

The Secondary Sources for your Paper
For your Research Paper, use only the sources indicated under A and B below:

Important: Use only the types of secondary sources indicated here!

A. Online Sources from IVCC's Jacob's Library
As an IVCC student, you have access to many excellent sources through the college library databases that present credible and scholarly interpretations of the stories.

The library databases require a login and password.

The first two links below take you to an "A to Z" list of all of the library databases and the search page for books in the library. Below those links is a list of the IVCC library databases that should be especially useful in helping you locate sources on the stories.

  1. IVCC Library's A-Z Databases
  2. IVCC Library Catalog
  1. Gale EBooks
  2. Gale Literature Criticism
  3. JSTOR
  4. Academic Search Complete
  5. ProQuest

If you see a "full text" box in the search area of a databases, make sure to check that box. Doing so will ensure that each of your search results will be the complete source.

Note that the number of sources you locate might vary greatly depending on which database you are using and which story you are searching for information about. Using different search words often can be helpful in giving you different search results.

If you are accessing the databases from a college computer, you do not need to enter a login and password. However, you will need to enter a login and password if you access the databases from any other computer.

B. Sources Found in Google Books and Google Scholar
You should not look for sources using Google or some other general search engine, but you may use Google Books and Google Scholar to locate sources for your research paper.

These search engines work just about the same as Google, but there is a big difference in the types and quality of sources that you will find in Google Books and Google Scholar compared to the sources in Google. 

As the name indicates, Google Books searches for books online. Many of these books originally appeared in print form. For some of your search matches, you will see only publication information and no parts of the book itself. For other search matches, you will see the entire book in a PDF format. And in other cases, you will see that parts of a book are available but other parts are not.

Google Scholar is a search engine that tries to weed out the bad sources and provide more scholarly sources. Similar to Google Books, the search results in Google Scholar can be complete sources, partial sources, or just publication information for a source.

Summary: The Sources to Use

Be aware that you may have to spend considerable time locating and evaluating sources for your research paper. That's just the nature of this type of assignment.

Preparing an Annotated Bibliography
As part of the Research Paper assignment, you will prepare and submit an annotated bibliography in MLA format. An annotated bibliography presents publication information for sources--the same information that would appear on a Works Cited page--but it also includes a summary of each source and your assessment of how each source might be helpful for your Research Paper.  

This probably will be a new type of assignment for most students in our class, so please take a few minutes to watch the videos about annotated bibliographies that appear on the webpages linked below:

Your annotated bibliography will follow the format shown on the "MLA Annotated Bibliography Template" (from Columbia College). This is a template, so you could just open the file, save it to your computer, and then use that template as you prepare your annotated bibliography.

In the format shown in the template linked above, your annotated bibliography will present at least five possible sources for your Research Paper, with the following information presented for each source:

  1. The publication information for the source (the same information that would appear for that source on a Works Cited page),
  2. A short paragraph-length summary of the source, and
  3. A couple of sentences explaining how the source might be useful for your paper.

The annotation for each source should be between 100 and 200 words, and again, your annotated bibliography needs to present information for at least five sources.     

Many of the sources in the library databases includes abstracts, which are similar to summaries. For your annotated bibliography, do not copy the abstract for the source and present it as your summary. Doing so would result in plagiarism. Instead, the summary should be your own work and should show that you have read the source carefully.

For more information about preparing an annotated bibliography for your research paper, see the resources listed below:

For information concerning the publication (or Works Cited) information you will need to record for your sources, see a "Preparing a Works Cited Page."

6. Step 3: Focusing your Approach and Preparing a Topic Proposal

Due by the end of the class period, Wednesday, March 23.

Important: The Topic Proposal does not receive a grade. However, because creating the topic proposal is an important step in your work on the Research Paper assignment, the Research Paper grade will be reduced by three percentage points if the topic proposal is not submitted, if it is submitted late, or if it is far below the requirements or expectations for the assignment.

After you have completed your annotated bibliography, you will have read many sources and should start developing a good sense of your approach to the story in your Research Paper. It is now time for you to decide what you plan to write about in your paper. You will submit your topic in the form of a topic proposal.

There are many types of topic proposals, and some can be quite long and involved, but you need to submit just a simple proposal of a few sentences that explains

  1. What central idea you plan to develop concerning the story, and
  2. What you hope to achieve by taking this approach.

As you develop your topic proposal, keep in mind the three general approaches that you can take for the Research Paper assignment: (1) critical context (How have scholars interpreted the story, and what do you think is the best interpretation?); (2) biographical context (How have the beliefs and the experiences of the author's life influenced the story?); and (3) historical and cultural contexts (How does the story reflect or comment on historical or cultural circumstances?)

Topic Proposal Examples for a Research Paper on Sophocles' Antigone

  1. Example 1: The paper will examine how gender roles in Ancient Thebes, and especially the expected behavior of women, play a role in the conflict between Antigone and Creon in Sophocles' Antigone. This approach should demonstrate that Antigone truly is an admirable and heroic character because of how she stands up to the authority of the King in a society that excluded women from nearly all forms of public discourse.

  2. Example 2: This paper will look at the political environment in Ancient Greece at the time that Sophocles wrote Antigone, with an emphasis on the role of King and how Creon might have been regarded by a contemporary audience. The paper should help readers understand Creon's strengths and weaknesses not by today's standards but by the standards of the society in which the play was created.

The topic proposal can be short, but it should be in MLA format, double spaced, with your name and class information in the upper left of the page.

7. Step 4: Researching and Taking Notes

At least 30 notes due by the beginning of the class period, Wednesday, March 30.

Important: The Research Paper notes do not receive a grade. However, because preparing notes is an important step in your work on the Research Paper assignment, the Research Paper grade will be reduced by three percentage points if the notes are not submitted, if they are submitted late, or if they are far below the requirements or expectations for the assignment.

After you have a good sense of your topic and an annotated bibliography with sources that should work well, you are ready to begin taking notes. This is also the time when you will be start forming an outline for your Research Paper.

You will be taking notes both from the story itself (called the "primary source") and from your research sources (called "secondary sources").

Read the story and your secondary sources carefully, and when you see something that you think you might be able to use in your paper, write down the information. This information will serve as supporting material that you could use when you write your paper. You can record the information as a quotation, a paraphrase, or a summary.

When you use a quotation, make sure to put quotation marks around the words you copy, even if you copy only a few words from the source, and make sure to copy the words exactly as they appear in the source. When you paraphrase, you convey the idea of a sentence or passage in a source, but you put the idea into your own words. You do basically the same thing when you summarize, but you take a large amount of material and convey it in your own words more briefly than it appears in the original. With both paraphrases and summaries, be careful not to change the meaning of the original as you use your own wording, and make sure that you really are using your own words. Do not copy a sentence from the source, change around a few words or replace a few words with synonyms, and present the sentence as your own. This is a form of plagiarism. The wording and the sentence structure of your paraphrases and summaries must be your own.

As you record your notes from the story, you should include a reminder of the context. Who is speaking the words? What is happening in the story at the time? You also need to record the author's last name and the page number for the information. It might seem like a lot of work to write all of this information down for each note you take, but it is important that you do so: you will need this information when you write your paper. If you leave off the page number for a quotation from the story, for instance, and you end up using the quotation in your paper, you will need to search through the source to find the correct information for your citation of the quotation.

Because this is a research paper, you will of course have to take plenty of notes not only from the story but also from secondary sources. A secondary source is an essay, chapter, book, or other source that helps you develop your ideas about the primary source, which is the story itself. A secondary source might present an interpretation of a character in the story, for instance, or a secondary source might provide historical information that helps us understand something that occurs in the story.

In your secondary sources, you should look for material that could work well in helping you develop the topic of your paper. When you find such information, you should record it as a quotation, a paraphrase, or a summary. With your note, make sure to include the author's last name and the page number (if given).

Except for the author's last name (and page number), you do not need to record any additional bibliographic information with the note if the source is on your annotated bibliography because the necessary Works Cited information will already appear in your bibliography. However, if your note is coming from a source that is not on your annotated bibliography, make sure to add the Works Cited information to the annotated bibliography so that you will have this information when you write your paper. However, you do not need to add an annotation to the bibliography for a new source.

As you are taking notes, you should write down anything that you think you could use in your paper. As you write your paper, you probably will not use all of the notes you recorded, but writing down a lot of notes will give you a large database that you can draw from. It is much easier to discard a note that ends up not being useful than having to go back through the story or through secondary sources searching for something that you think you remember reading.

How many individual notes should you have before you begin writing your paper? This varies depending on your topic and the length of your paper, but it would be a good idea to try to record at least fifty notes before you begin writing your paper. This probably sounds like a high number, but consider that your notes are going to serve as the supporting material for your ideas in the Research Paper. The minimum required length for the Research Paper is 2500 words, or about eight double-spaced pages, so fifty notes would average out to only about six quotations per page of your paper (or paragraphs and summaries). And if you have at least fifty strong notes as you begin writing your paper, you might have all of the information you need from the story and from secondary sources. You will appreciate not having to return to the story and not having to look through more secondary sources as you write your Research Paper.

For each of your notes, you should include a brief heading to help you organize your notes later. The headings are vital because they will help you form an outline for your paper. You can see examples on our Using Note Cards page. As the page shows, the writer of our paper on Antigone noticed that the quotations relate to how Creon seems to have good intentions in the play, so the writer simply put "Creon's Good Intentions" at the top of the notes. Include a heading with each note, and try to limit the number of headings that you use. Limiting the number of headings will show that you are focusing your approach as you are doing research and will help you create an outline for your paper.

The Step 2: Researching your Subject and Preparing an Annotated Bibliography section above provides more information about looking for secondary sources to use in your paper and indicates the types of sources to use.

Students seem to have different preferences in how they record their research notes, so how you organize and keep track of your notes is to you. You will be submitting your note-taking work to demonstrate that you are keeping up with this important step in writing the Research Paper, but aside from the basics explained above (such as the use of headings), there are no specific requirements in terms of how your notes are presented.

For many years, students would take notes for research papers by Using Note Cards, and this approach might work well for you.

However, nowadays, often a better approach is to record the notes directly into your word processor. For example, imagine this process for the writer of our Antigone paper. Imagine that the writer has already recorded two notes with the heading "Creon's Good Intentions." The writer, realizing that this could be a good topic for part of the paper, puts the two notes with this heading together by moving them around in the document. The writer then becomes more alert for any additional information in the play or in secondary sources that relates to this topic. If the writer limits the number of headings and organizes the note-taking document into these different headings, the writer will be quite close to having an outline, complete with supporting evidence, at the end of the note-taking process. Nice!

8. Step 5: Preparing an Outline

Due by the beginning of the class period, Wednesday, April 6

Important: The Research Paper outline does not receive a grade. However, because creating the outline is an important step in your work on the Research Paper assignment, the Research Paper grade will be reduced by three percentage points if the outline is not submitted, if it is submitted late, or if it is far below the requirements or expectations for the assignment.

After you have completed your note taking with those all-important headings, you are ready for the next step, which is the creation of an outline for your paper.

The outline for your Research Paper should follow the basic format show on the "Sample Outline" handout from IVCC's Writing Center. (However, you should have more than just four body paragraphs for your paper.)

This should not be your entire paper in outline form, but you should include enough detail in your outline to clearly express your topics and some of the supporting material that you plan to use to develop those topics. Your outline also should present your topics in what you think is the most logical order. In addition, this should be a full-sentence outline, meaning that everything in your outline should be presented as complete sentences.

This probably sounds like a big task, and it will take time to write a strong outline, but much of your work is already completed for you in the form of your notes with the headings. To prepare your outline, look carefully at the headings for your notes and try to imagine those different topics coming together in a paper. You could copy all of your headings and put them into an order that makes the most sense to you. There might be one or two headings that do not seem to fit with the others, so it might be best to leave behind the notes under those headings. Or those notes might fit well under a different heading. You might discover a logical order for most of your headings but notice that you need to add a new heading that does not appear with your notes.

After you organize your headings in a logical way, you could copy some of the supporting material under each heading, including your own explanation of the importance and relevance of that supporting evidence (indicated as "Explanation" on our "Sample Outline").

You then would want to put everything into complete sentences, and you almost have your completed outline. Just add your possible thesis statement and a restatement of the thesis, along with a general sense of what additional information will appear in the introduction and conclusion, and you will be finished with your outline. (But of course add your name and class information to the top of the first page to make sure you receive credit for your excellent work!)

After you finish your outline, not only will you be ready to write a draft of your Research Paper, but much of that draft will already be completed through your work on the note-taking and the outline.

9. Step 6: Writing a Draft of your Research Paper

A draft of the Research Paper of at least 1800 words is due at the beginning of the class period, Wednesday, April 13.

Important: The Research Paper draft for peer critique does not receive a grade. However, because the draft is an important step in your work on the Research Paper assignment, the Research Paper grade will be reduced by three percentage points if the Research Paper draft for peer critique is not submitted, if it is submitted late, or if it is below the length requirement for the assignment.

If you have spent a significant amount of time recording notes from your primary and secondary sources and preparing an outline, you should be well prepared to begin writing your Research Paper.

Your outline is your best guide to help you write your paper. A good starting point would be simply to copy and paste the information from your outline into an essay form. You will need to add material and will need to rewrite sentences, but the outline should form the basis for your Research Paper draft. If you have done a thorough and careful job of taking notes, all the supporting material you will need for your paper might be recorded in your notes. You might not have to consult any more secondary sources, and you might not even have to look again at the story. Of course, if you find that you need more support, you will have to continue researching your topic as you write your paper.

Keep in mind that the Research Paper is much like the essays you have already written, especially Essay 2. The main difference is that you are now drawing support from a variety of different sources, and, of course, the Research Paper is longer. However, if you think in terms of the major divisions of your paper, the major ideas as stated in the form of topics in your outline, you can approach the writing of your Research Paper as a series of shorter writing tasks. Of course, remember that all of your paper should help you develop your thesis concerning the topic you have chosen, but you can approach the development of your thesis by tackling one major outline topic at a time, weaving the different parts of your paper together after you start finishing drafts of the different sections.

In terms of organizing and developing your ideas in the Research Paper, the same guidelines apply to the Research Paper that have applied to the other essays for the class:

Also, remember that your paper, even though it will incorporate material from several different sources, should convey your own interpretation. Be careful not to lose your own writing voice among the material from secondary sources. The supporting material from the story and from secondary sources is vital to your paper, but your own unique insights are what will make your paper most interesting to readers.

10. Step 7: Revising and Proofreading your Research Paper

The revised draft of the Research Paper of at least 2500 words is due no later than the end of the day, Saturday, April 23. Please see the assignment area of Blackboard for more information.

The process of revising the Research Paper is much the same as the process of revising a shorter essay. While the writing process varies greatly from person to person, the most successful students tend to spend a lot of time revising their papers.

The information and the webpages linked below should help you revise, including the pages linked under "Tips for Writing a Successful Research Paper" and the information under "Evaluation Criteria and Additional Suggestions for the Research Paper." Of course, the Revision Checklist should give you many aspects of your paper to consider as you revise.

As you revise, please give special consideration to the feedback that you have received on earlier graded essays. Any aspects of your earlier essays that could have been stronger are likely to be aspects of your Research Paper draft that need extra attention.

11. Using, Citing, and Documenting Sources

You have already had some practice using secondary sources for Essay 2, and the same principles apply to your use of secondary sources in the research paper. However, secondary sources will be even more important for the research paper.

Make sure you are familiar with the information on the following pages:

Plagiarism
The possibility of plagiarism increases when material from several different sources enters a paper. Remember this general rule: you should always distinguish clearly your ideas and words from ideas and words of other writers. If that distinction becomes blurred, the paper most likely contains plagiarism.

You should of course work hard to avoid plagiarism as you bring material from secondary sources into your paper. A paper with any plagiarism, even if the plagiarism is unintentional, means a failing grade for the paper. Refer to the sources listed below for more information about paraphrasing from sources and avoiding plagiarism.

12. Tips for Writing a Successful Research Paper

The following web pages provide information that should be helpful as you write, revise, and proofread your research paper. Some of the pages present information that is repeated on other pages, but this repetition is intentional: it may help reinforce the importance of the information.

13. Evaluation Criteria and Additional Suggestions for the Research Paper

Below is a list of evaluation criteria for the Research Paper. Most of this information should look familiar. Good writing is good writing, and an effective research paper on a work of literature shares the basic characteristics of an effective shorter analysis of a literary work. When I evaluate the research papers, I will be paying special attention to the aspects of the papers explained below. You should think about the criteria as you are writing your paper, and you should check the criteria after you have written a draft to see how well your paper meets each of the evaluation criteria.

Thesis
Your research paper must include a clearly stated and well-focused thesis, or main idea.

Remember, your thesis should be stated in your introduction as only one complete sentence that

  1. identifies the topic of the essay,
  2. states the main points developed in the essay,
  3. clarifies how all of the main points are logically related, and
  4. conveys the purpose of the essay.

Even though your research paper will be longer than the other papers you have written in the course, the research paper still should include a one-sentence statement of the paper's thesis. Typically, thesis statements do not increase in length as the length of a paper increases. Even long books can have a one-sentence thesis statement. Of course, the language of the thesis statement for a long work might have to be a little more general than it would be for a shorter paper, but you should still try to state your thesis as specifically and as accurately as possible in just one sentence.

Organization
The usual minimum number of paragraphs for short essays is five. You will need to use more than five paragraphs for your research paper.

As with all persuasive and interpretive papers, your research paper should present well-developed body paragraphs that are focused on proving one main claim each. Again, the most effective way to organize such a paper is by beginning each body paragraph with a claim, an interpretation that you think you can prove with specific evidence. Of course, all of the different claims you present in your body paragraphs should be logically related and should help you develop and support your thesis.

Make sure you have a distinct introduction and conclusion in your paper, with a clear thesis statement in the introduction and a clear restatement of that thesis in the conclusion.

Support and Development of Ideas
Each aspect of your thesis should be well supported and well developed.

For this paper, you will be drawing support not only from a story (your primary source) but from several other sources as well (your secondary sources). One thing you will need to decide is what kind of "balance" you want to establish in your paper between support from the primary source and support from your secondary sources.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind.

First, the main source of support for your paper should be the story itself, not what other people have said about it. Papers vary greatly, but you might try to include at least two or three pieces of supporting evidence from the story for every piece of support you use from a secondary source.

Second, realize that something is not true just because someone says it is. Interpretations from other writers should be regarded as just that--interpretations. Most often, you should use material from secondary sources to help you further develop an interpretation that you are able to support with material from the primary source alone. If you are trying to prove a claim about the story, support from the story itself is in the form of facts; support from secondary sources most often is in the form of interpretations.

Third, make sure to assess the credibility of your secondary sources carefully. For the Research Paper, you will be not only a writer but also a researcher, and the kinds of secondary sources you use can either strengthen or weaken your paper.

Insight into Subject
The insightfulness of a paper often is directly related to the organization and development of the ideas in the paper. If you have well-developed body paragraphs focused on one specific point each, then it is likely that you are going into depth with the ideas you present.

The Research Paper should also reflect your familiarity with what other people have said about the aspect or aspects of the story that you are analyzing. You should avoid putting material from secondary sources into your essay if that material is not clearly relevant to your thesis. Instead, material from sources should relate clearly and directly to the specific interpretation that you develop.

Use of Secondary Sources
There are several important thing you should consider about your use of sources in the research paper, including the following:

You should ask yourself all of these questions before submitting the final draft of the paper.

It is also important to realize that your ability to do effective research on your topic will play a role in the evaluation of your research paper. Again, your paper should demonstrate your familiarity with what others have said about the specific aspects of the story that you are analyzing, and the information from secondary sources that you bring into your paper must be clearly relevant to the specific points that you are examining and explaining.

In short, the evaluation criteria within this category include what kinds of material from secondary sources you have found and use, how well you present material from sources in the paper, how correctly you cite the sources, and how correctly you document them on the "Works Cited" page.

Clarity
According to IVCC's Grading Standards for Student Essays, "A," "B," and "C" essays are clear throughout, meaning that problems with clarity can have a substantial effect on the grade of an essay.

Problems in the Research Paper could arise if the meaning, relevance, and significance of words quoted from secondary sources is not completely clear. Make sure that the words and ideas you use from secondary sources flow naturally with your own train of thought throughout the paper, and offer explanations of the meaning of material from secondary sources if that meaning might be unclear to readers.

Style
Writers almost always use a formal voice for research papers, and you should adopt a formal writing voice for your paper. This means that you should avoid use of the first person ("I," "me," "we," etc.), the use of contractions ("can't," "won't," etc.), and the use of slang or other information language.

Also, be careful not to lose your own voice in your paper. Avoid allowing your paper to become a collection of ideas and words from other writers. Instead, stay focused on developing your own interpretation, using material from sources to help you further develop and support your ideas.

Another important aspect of style is how well the material from secondary sources flows with your own words and ideas.

Mechanics
Pay special attention to the "correctness" of your research paper if you had problems with errors in your other essays. The Identifying and Correcting Errors webpage should help, but please ask if you have any questions.

The elimination of errors from your writing is important. In fact, according to IVCC's Grading Standards for Student Essays, "A," "B," and "C" essays contain "almost no errors." Significant or numerous errors are a characteristic of a "D" or "F" essay.

Questions?

Please ask questions that you have about this assignment!

Copyright Randy Rambo, 2022