For Class on Monday April 28

The prompt for your final assignment, which will be due the Monday of finals week (May 19th), can be found to the right. As we discussed, we will approach this assignment largely in reverse: from the topic and the research of that topic, to the outline, to the executive summary (or abstract, though there are differences). This is part of our larger, term long project of moving from generating general knowledge (reading newspapers), to developing an initial argument (paper 2), to rendering that argument in the terms appropriate to higher college level writing (the research paper or, in our case, the apparatus around one).

Your first task, then, is to determine a topic or, more specifically, adjust your topic from your last paper into something substantially more complex (this may end up something more like a new topic). A good way to start: If you had to write a 20 page paper on your particular topic, what would need to change, how would the topic need to be adjusted? Generally, this might mean adding an historical element--an argument about Bhutto's death, for example, might not just deal with contemporary accounts in the NYPostho but give a ten page historical overview of reporting on assassinations over a given period of time. I will ask you to explain how that historical survey would help an argument, so keep that in mind (in the given example, perhaps it will be that the historical survey shows that the current obsessions with how Bhutto died are not new obsessions).

It is critical that you do this with some sense of what's available. Spend time looking through the databases, specifically Project Muse and Jstor, typing in your search terms, narrowing those terms, and seeing what's out there on these topics. If you have any technical difficulties, let me know immediately, rather than coming to class and saying: 'I couldn't log on.'

But in the end this is mostly about thinking, and spending time thinking. Ask yourself about the course of your thinking over the term--what are the questions about what you've been studying which it would take a library to answer?

Your assignment for th 28th, then, is to post the following here:

1) the topic for your new 'paper'
2) a one paragraph explanation of what kind of research you will be looking for.
3) a sentence or two explaining how the research will help prove your point.