Advanced Research Project:
Sources, Quotations, Citations, Commentary, and Introductions

Your final project requires that you perform the research required for a scholarly essay and figure out how you plan to use your sources to support a conceptual thesis. To that end, you must find useful sources of various types, quote specific passages from them that you would use in the essay, explain how you would plan to make use of these quotations, offer two possible introductions for the essay, and cite your research according to MLA, APA, or Chicago Manual of Style guidelines. Doing all of this successfully means that when you actually write this kind of essay, you can spend your time writing the essay on the writing itself: organization, coherence, clarity, and style. When you fail to do that, your position is likely to be similar to that of a carpenter who finds halfway through a project that he needs to find and cut more wood. Doing this assignment successfully proves you can do all the intellectual heavy-lifting before you need to focus on the writing itself.

Primary Sources

Primary sources include most government documents, published or personally performed interviews, first-hand accounts, most journalism (stories in the newspaper and news media), and all creative works (literary texts, films and television shows, musical recordings and scores, and so on). You may or may not need to cite some primary sources in your essay, and if you do, the type and number will vary widely depending on your topic. For this part of the research project, all you need to do is list these sources in your works cited or reference list.

Secondary Sources

You must quote at least eight secondary sources, including

One or more scholarly books:  Useful books for this project can be of two types:

A) A book that focuses on a single topic and maintains a coherent narrative and argument from beginning to end. This type of book usually has a single author, or occasionally two who work collaboratively.

B) A book that is actually a collection of essays by different authors. Sometimes the essays have been published before; sometimes they are commissioned especially for the book.  The book itself usually addresses a single topic to which all the specific essays are in some way relevant.

Note: Encyclopedias do not count as acceptable sources. You may use them to help get you started on your research, but you should not be quoting them for your readers.

Five or more articles published in scholarly journals: This means essays or articles you find in peer-reviewed journal academic journals. Databases such as Expanded Academic and J-STOR can be good places to start looking, but as we have discussed, sometimes you will have more success if you use databases devoted specifically to your discipline. The article usually will not have been published before, unless it is a translation. The journal’s focus may be specific or broad, but again at least part of the article should deal specifically with the topic. You may obtain these sources in hard-copy or electronically, provided they initially appeared in print. Note that book reviews are not acceptable sources; if you find a book review that offers some useful ideas, find the book being reviewed and quote it directly.

Other possible sources: You may supplement the scholarly sources with other valid sources, such as documentary films and videos, articles from trade journals, and online sources, provided that you vet them carefully by checking who is responsible for their content. Long-form journalism — for example, the type that is published or broadcast as a result of long-term investigative reporting, not as a news story — can also be a valid source. If you are uncertain about a source, check it with me.

Unacceptable sources: For this project, you may not use book reviews, editorials or other opinion pieces, or online material from commercial websites.

You must find a total of ten secondary-source quotations you foresee being useful in your essay, and no more than two can be from any one source. These quotations should be long enough to give you something to work with but not so long that they would overwhelm your essay.  No more than two of them, therefore, should be long enough to require setting off (which in MLA and Chicago means longer than four lines and in APA longer than forty words), these two cannot be from the same source, and even those two must be no more than one hundred words each.

To be useful, a quotation must require citation. Therefore, it must either offer the author’s judgment (Type 1) or present information that resulted specifically from the author’s or authors’ efforts (Type 2). As we have discussed, basic factual information does not require citation).

Of the ten quotations, at least six must be Type 1; the rest can be Type 1 or Type 2. I do not want Type 3 quotations — when you quote only because you are using someon else's phrasing — for this project.

Generally, when quoting any source, you will want to quote at least one complete clause (or a verb-phrase for which you supply the subject) but no more than three or four sentences, depending on their length. If you quote less than one full clause, conveying the original meaning becomes difficult and readers may suspect you are distorting what the source says, but if you quote more than a few sentences, either you cannot respond fully or the source starts to take over your essay. Each quotation should be in the proper format and cited parenthetically. All aspects of the quotation and citation form must be correct.

A quotation also must be comprehensible: quote in a way that the ideas in the quotation are clear. If, in order for that to happen, you need to set up a quotation with a brief introductory tag, conclude a quotation with a few words that complete a thought, or as a last resort insert a one- or two-word bracketed explanation somewhere within the quotation, please do so.

Rarely is quoting second-hand acceptable. If you find that one of your sources has taken a quotation from another source, you have a responsibility to find that original source unless you cannot be reasonably expected to do so. Legitimate reasons for not obtaining the original source of the quotation include 1) it is an unpublished source, such as personal correspondence or recollection of a conversation, 2) it was published in a different language, or 3) it is an old or rare book that you cannot obtain. Otherwise, you must acquire any source you quote. If you quote a source second-hand, and I can find the original source with extraordinary effort, you do not get credit for the source.

Your document should list the quotations, organized by the categories of the secondary sources. Within each category, list the quotations alphabetically by author’s last name. Each quotation must be properly formatted and cited with a parenthetical citation.

For each quotations, write a short explanation of how you plan to use it. 

For Type 1 quotations, you have two basic options, and within each of those options you have two options as well:

1) You agree with your source:

A)  Extension — You plan to build on the source’s argument in some way that the original source does not, using the point the quotation makes to help you make a point of your own. A good test of this use of the quotation is that you can mentally insert the phrase “If this is true, then we can go further and say this” between the quotation and your commentary (note that I said mentally).  In this case, you should of course explain what that point is in some detail. 

B)  Application — You plan to apply the quotation in a way the original source did not. For example, if you quote a scholar’s comment on a particular historical event, such as a battle or an election, then discuss how that same observation applies to a different battle or election, then you are applying the quotation in a new way. Alternatively, if a source makes a slightly broader comment (further up the Scale of Abstraction), you can use it by applying it to a specific example. A good test of this use of the quotation is if you can mentally insert the phrase “This helps us understand another (or a specific) situation” between the quotation and your commentary (again, mentally). In this case, you must explain how the quotation is relevant to the work you are discussing.

2) You disagree with your source:

A)  Logical Rebuttal — You think your source draws a false conclusion because of faulty reasoning. In Toulmin terms, you believe the claim is bad because the warrant is faulty. This may involve a recognizable logical fallacy, or it may just be a case in which you think the warrant does not hold up.

B)  Evidentiary Rebuttal — You think your source draws a false conclusion because of bad evidence. In Toulmin terms, you believe the claim is bad because the grounds are faulty. The usual problem is not that the evidence your source presents is bad, but that he or she ignores contrary evidence.

You must rebut (for either reason) at least one quotation. For the remaining quotations, the choice is up to you.

Put your comment on each quotation directly under the quotation. Label each comment Extend, Apply, Rebut Logically, or Rebut with Evidence.

For Type 2 quotations, describe why this information is useful to you. Remember, a Type 2 quotation supplies grounds, not a warrant. To what claim is this information relevant, and how will you connect the two? This claim must be more specific than your thesis — a supporting argument, not your main argument.

Now that you have completed all of your research, you should write two possible introductions for the essay:

1) A closed-form introduction, with the essay’s thesis at the end of the paragraph

This introduction should start out on an appropriate level of the scale of abstraction. It should clearly establish your essay’s focus and motivate readers who have an interest in your topic to reader further, and it must give you an opportunity to use all of the quotations you have analyzed in your project as support. Coherence is key: the transition to the thesis should be smooth. If your thesis seems suddenly dropped in from somewhere else, it will not be a successful introduction. Of course, the thesis should be concise, well-written, and conform to all the principles on the Writing Center’s Guidelines on Thesis Statements.

2) An open-form introduction, which means it ends by clearly stating the issue the thesis will settle or by asking a question the thesis will answer

Again, coherence is important. But the biggest challenge in this introduction for most of you will be successfully accomplishing the goals of this kind of introduction, which means both that the thesis (which, again, would appear in the essay’s conclusion) would settle the issue as you define it, and that you raise the issue in a way that clearly defines your essay’s focus without giving away what the thesis will be.

Your works cited or reference page should include correct and complete entries for each of your sources, and it should be properly formatted: double-spaced (as the quotations and your text should be as well), alphabetized, but not separated into categories. You should title your project with a possible title for the essay itself.

The discussion of how you plant to use each quotation should be a paragraph of at least 75 words (not including quotations). The two introductions should be at least 125 words each, and no more than 225 each. The Works Cited or References page should be its own page.

Come to class with three hard-copies of your entire project. In addition, prior to class you must send the document directly to me at rnanian@gmu.edu as a .doc or .docx attachment to an e-mail message.

After receiving feedback from your peers in the peer response session, you will revise this project and submit it to me for evaluation.

Submit the document directly to me by e-mail. Along with the essay you must submit a reflective commentary. Attach both the essay and the reflective commentary to the same e-mail.

Submit these to me directly at rnanian@gmu.edu as .doc or .docx attachments to an e-mail message. Note: It is your responsibility to make sure your documents attach. You can confirm this by examining the message in your sent message folder. If you send me an e-mail saying “Here is my project” and no documents are attached, the essay has not been submitted.

Note: A time comes in every writing project that you must let it go and hope for the best. Because this is the last assignment of the semester, I will not accept these projects late. You must submit them by midnlight on the day specified on the calendar, or I will use the initial draft you submitted for peer response as your final draft. This seldom works out well. Please understand that this is a fairness issue: if you submit the project late and I accept it, I would be doing a disservice to everyone who has submitted it on time. Who knows what problems they could have fixed if they had an extra day, an extra hour, or even less? Plus, the reality is that most documents you write in your life will need to be submitted by a particular deadline. Lateness results in rejection, in loss of reputation, potentially in loss of employment — in failure, in other words. If you find yourself, at 11:58 on Saturday, desperately attempting to attach a document to an e-mail, you are not taking the best approach to life.

For this assignment, I will complete a rubric — a document listing the various factors that determine the quality of the project. The factors are divided into two categories: Content issues and Grammatical and Stylistic issues. All of the individual scores in each category are averaged, and then I multiply these two averages together to determine a percentage, which I multiply by the 20 points (out of 100) available in the course.