When you are working on an academic project, there comes a time to draw the strands of your research together and articulate your conclusions in writing.
Andrea Lunsford, The Everyday Writer (166)
A successful research essay represents your contribution to a larger conversation happening among members of the discourse community of the university. You are the only person who has performed your particular research tasks, but many others are concerned with the bigger questions. Your job as a novice researcher is to explain to an academic audience how your findings support a fresh and original understanding of those issues. But for an academic audience, it’s not enough to just have an opinion. To be persuasive, your conclusions must proceed through the explication of evidence. Where appropriate, your argument should analyze and interpret each source using the strategies of summary (“setting up contexts and providing background information”), paraphrase (“giving a sense of the author’s argument”), or quotation (“drawing attention to something particularly evocative or insightful in the author’s own words”) (CR 94).
For this assignment, you will write a 1800- to 2500-page paper that advances and sustains a research-based argument about your topic. Your paper should answer your research question as completely as possible in a way that will be appealing and persuasive for academic audiences. To this end, your paper should articulate a thesis that answers your research question and should support that thesis with authoritative evidence, providing an adequate background and context, explaining what’s at stake, and showing how your research contributes to a deeper understanding of the topic. Your argument should reasonably account for opposition or differences of scholarly opinion—not simply rejecting your “opponents” but accounting for their critiques. Further, your essay should demonstrate a mastery of academic English, with sentences that are written with precision and clarity, with introductory and concluding paragraphs that articulate the larger stakes of the argument, and with well-organized body paragraphs that advance your argument by presenting and interpreting evidence.
Once complete, your essay must be at least 7 full pages in length and must make use of at least six sources (of which at least 3 must be scholarly sources). Your paper should adhere to MLA style for research papers and include a Works Cited page with correct MLA citations for each cited source.
A successful Research Essay will:
Be submitted on time and complete for each due date, according to the instructions;
Begin with a clearly written introduction that provides a sophisticated and insightful answer to the research question and that explains how the essay contributes to the scholarly conversation about the topic;
Advance an original argument through explication of academic and popular sources, developing in complexity over the full course of the essay, and using topic sentences and transitions effectively to signal the introduction of new ideas;
Represent the scholarly conversation about the topic with sophistication, citing at least three authoritative academic sources and representing their views accurately;
Integrate each source effectively, using both signal phrases and MLA in-text citations to indicate another’s work, all while maintaining coherence and readability; and
Demonstrate a mastery of the essay as a genre and of edited academic English—with well-written prose, effective organization, and appropriate language.
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