Writing a prospectus is your opportunity to clarify, both to yourself and to me, the project you would like to pursue in your final paper. Your prospectus will establish the framework for your paper, and should orient you both in developing your argument and in providing an organized structure in which to pursue it. Please be committed to the project you depict; your project might change somewhat as you work through it, but the paper you write should be clearly premised on the prospectus you hand in.
Your essay should be developed on the basis of (some of) the central texts and themes of the course, and should aim to formulate a specific project, focus, problem, or question. Try to work with just one or two texts and limit your project’s scope. You will be evaluated on your ability to grapple directly with primary sources; if you use secondary sources, take care to cite appropriately and to acknowledge not just citations but ideas that are not your own. Your final paper should be clearly distinct from other work you have done for this class or previously.
Undergraduate students should aim to articulate a project that will be the basis of a 7-8 page paper. Graduate students should aim to articulate a project that will be the basis of a 15-20 page paper.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FORMULATING YOUR LINE OF INQUIRY
Re-read the material that most interests you and that you think will be the basis for your paper. Don’t read everything; concentrate your attention on what you find engaging or compelling, and as you read try to determine what precisely you find thought-provoking and why.
Ask yourself: what problems, questions, and/or ideas have I encountered in the readings that I want to say something about? What requires further analysis to be better understood or situated? How can I synthesize some of the material we’ve read to develop my own project? Have issues arisen during class discussion that I would like to pursue?
Take notes. As you read, jot down the ideas, concepts, textual claims, that you think are most significant to the topic or question you have in mind. This will help you later as you try to formulate your project.
Define for yourself, in writing, the meaning of each concept, how it functions within the text(s) you are using, and why it is important.
Make connections among the ideas you have listed and defined. How do they work together? Which ones help explain which other ones? What larger story do they tell together or what larger problem do they complicate or elucidate?
Re-read the material again, this time looking to see if your interpretations are borne out by the text, and if there’s anything else you need to think about. Think also about whether your project is specific and focused or if you’ve attempted to tackle too much.
Take notes from the text, writing out quotes that you may want to use or refer to, and marking out specific page numbers where particular ideas are discussed.
You will now have done quite a bit of work that sets the stage for writing. The next step is to put that work into an organized form and define a coherent project.
PUTTING YOUR IDEAS TOGETHER AND DEVELOPING A THESIS
Look over your notes, the ideas and concepts you’ve written down, their definitions and connections, and the quotes you have selected. Think about how you want to define and pursue the questions or problems you’ve begun to articulate. What do you want your paper to accomplish and what explanations, evidence, and arguments will you need to offer in order to support your position?
What, specifically, are the questions or problems you identify? Why are they significant? What will be your specific approach in addressing these questions?
What ideas or concepts stand out as complex and in need of interpretation?
Can you formulate a thesis that will be the basis of the paper?
Can you envision the steps it will take to support that thesis and arrive at a conclusion?
What textual resources will you rely on, and why are they salient to the question you want to address and the thesis you want to support?
Draw up an outline. This is a good opportunity to focus your thinking, to begin to organize and structure your argument, and to consider the direction and development of the paper as a whole. Writing an outline is a good way to maintain control of the paper and its trajectory, and will help you assume responsibility as an author for the overall shape of what you write. (This outline is for you, to give you a way of organizing and drawing your thoughts together. It will not be turned in.)
YOUR PROSPECTUS
The actual prospectus you turn in should be the last step and the culmination of a process through which you have already grappled extensively with the texts under your consideration. (Although this is the only part of the prospectus work I will see, take the other tasks seriously as they will engage you early on in the preparatory work that is necessary for writing a strong paper and will make the final product better.)
The goal of the prospectus is for you to formulate a specific project or thesis that is distinctively yours. At this point you should have clearly developed the parameters of the question/problem you are pursuing and you should be able to articulate precisely what this question is, the ideas you have developed in response to it, and your approach to the problem. Formulate these ideas as a (preliminary) thesis that you can lay out in a few sentences, and then explain that thesis in a few more sentences. Describe the trajectory of the paper: how you will go about supporting the thesis, the approach you will use in pursuing it, the main ideas you will develop, and how you envision the paper developing. Be sure to specify which sections of which texts will form the basis of your paper and indicate why you have chosen them (how and why they form the basis of the problems you will address). Make clear the structure of your paper, and its organizational shape. You might want to think of this work as either being an abstract of the paper as a whole, or as being an introduction to the paper (these are slightly different approaches).
Last Completed Projects
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