Explain your topic to an average reader, and discuss why you are personally interested in your subject.

As part of a complete research project, three pre-writing steps are also required as Discussion Board posts. These steps are meant to break up the workload of the project and give you ‘stepping stones’ from the beginning to the final draft. Your pre-writing counts as three journal entries.
1) Proposal: Compose a 1-2 page discussion of your topic. 1) Explain your topic to an average reader, and discuss why you are personally interested in your subject. 2) Take an hour and conduct some preliminary research. How much or how little research can you find? Discuss how easy or hard your research step appears to be. 3) Discuss your possible focus for your paper. What do you wish to focus on?What do you want to argue? What do you want to say? 4) Think about the next month of your life and discuss where this workload fits into your schedule.
2) Research Statement: After you have gathered and reviewed your 10-15 outside sources, write a 1-2 page summary of your research. 1) Begin with a brief paragraph summarizing what you found as a whole.What have you gathered so far? 2) Name your top three sources you intend to use, summarize each one, and explain why this source is valuable to your paper. 3) List 2-3 ‘other’ sources that you found and do the same. These can be shorter/weaker/less important sources compared to your first three. 4) End with another short paragraph and discuss how much more research you still need to find. Are you done researching or still in the process?
3) Outline: Write a 1-2 page working outline for your final draft. Be sure that your outline includes the following features: thesis, major points, likely sources, estimated page length, and final analysis. There is not one ‘ideal’ outline format. Use an outline format that works best for you and your paper. Draw it, type it, make a list, freewrite, whatever. Make it beneficial to you.
Writing Guidelines: Remember that these are “pre-writing”. I consider them work-in-progress drafts of your final paper. Your idea can substantially change from your proposal to your final draft, and that is perfectly fine.Remember that these represent your planning stage. Feel free to write it in a first-person, narrative voice. Make sure they are relatively well written, but don’t worry too much about polishing these. Just make them readable and clear.Each piece of writing should take you about an hour. They should be no less than a full page and no more than two full pages.

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