Writing Strategies Jonathan Ullyot Research Essay Prompt 800-1000 words
In this class, you’ve learned how to write a close reading essay and a comparative or lens essay. The research essay combines elements of both: close reading and interpreting one text by comparing it to another text. The research paper poses a question which then necessitates doing more research into the topic.
There is no specific prompt for the research paper. You will pick a topic that really interests you and research that topic by reading more works by your target author.
Your research essay must have at least four separate works in your references section: three primary texts by the same author and one secondary text about that author.
The criteria for these four texts is the following:
1. One text that we’ve looked at in this course (*you cannot pick T. S. Eliot or either author you looked at in your comparison essay). (EG: Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”)
2. One text by the same author in the same genre as 1. that we have not looked at in this class. (EG: Plath’s “Morning Song” [not “Daddy”])
3. One text by the same author in a different genre than 1. and 2. (EG: a chapter from’s Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar)
4. One secondary source about one or all of the above texts. (EG: A chapter in Jo Gill’s The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath)
Notes:
Your goal, as always, is to advance a specific and debatable thesis.
You don’t have to give each primary text equal weight. You can spend most of your time analyzing one text and only bring in the other texts as support. However, you should analyze at least one passage from each of your primary texts.
Your engagement with the secondary source should not take up more than 10-15% of your essay. The secondary source is there as an argument to support your thesis or offer a complication to your argument.
Often, a research essay of this type follows this rough formula: “Text X raises a question that is not fully answered unless one does a close analysis of texts Y and Z.” OR: “Text X seems to say
THIS about topic A, however, this is complicated by texts Y and Z in the following ways: [], which in turn suggests another way to read text X or think about topic A.”
Your secondary source should be from a published work, such a peer reviewed article. It should engage with your author’s ideas, not his or her biography. Go to the library or find a few essays about your topic online. Use the Seneca library system and search for essays on your author and topic. Don’t just use some random website or blog or Wikipedia. (Wikipedia, however, sometimes has references to good secondary sources.) The point is to do some digging: you should read two or three secondary sources and pick the one that you find the most helpful or interesting. You may use a youtube video if the lecture is by a professor. Don’t use a biographical video. (Even Ken Burns’s biography of Hemingway, although great, is not a good secondary source.)
Some contextualization is necessary in a research paper. It’s important to note when an essay or poem appeared and what kind of impact it had, especially if the specific issues are less pertinent today. But this should take up no more than 3% of your writing; the rest is close analysis and lens interpretation.
Don’t do biographical interpretation. (EG: do not discuss how Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” anticipates her own suicide or is about her relationship to Ted Hughes.)
Your paper should engage with literary terms and critical thinking terms, even if you’re writing mostly about poetry or short stories. You might look at reasoning fallacies, evidence claims, use of statistics, appeals to ethos, etc.
Refer and read closely the description of what a research paper is from both the U of Toronto “Research Essay Handout,” and the Purdue online writing lab.
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/common_writing_assignments/research_papers/ genre_and_the_research_paper.html
There are some excellent notes about the processes to do before writing. Research papers require research and a lot of work before you start writing. If you just pick and choose a few random texts, and one secondary source, and try to summarize what you’ve got into a vague thesis, you won’t succeed. You need to look in depth at your target author before deciding.
I want to argue that Sylvia Plaths insanity and mental illness is what keeps her sane. It is not her biggest downfall but her greatest quality
For the four texts you will use according to the prompt the first text you will use is lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath the second text you will use is morning song by Sylvia Plath, the third text will be the bell jar by Sylvia Plath and fourth text and the secondary source you will use will be a chapter in Jo Gill’s The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath)
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