Your goal in this exercise is to define how you plan to proceed with your major research project in this class. Your exercise will consist of two parts:

Part 1: Identify the audience you intend your research paper to reach. Who are your readers? Then, define the issue you intend your project to examine and ultimately to solve. Why would your readers find this particular project worth their time? You should not attempt to offer the solution yet; the purpose here is establishing the focus of your inquiry, not providing the answer.

Part 2: Identify at least five secondary sources you believe will be useful for this essay. They may include books, articles from scholarly journals and trade journals, audio or video recordings, and scholarly or otherwise properly vetted online sources. Identify each one with a proper bibliographic citation, and then explain in two or three sentences whether it offers purely factual information or analysis of some kind, and why the source is relevant to your project.

You should be able to address Part 1 in a single paragraph of approximately 175-200 words.

Remember that the words how and why are much more productive than who, what, when, and where. Indeed, questions involving who, what, when, and where become productive only when you add a how or why question to them. You do not need to phrase your inquiry as a question, but articulating the issue in how and why terms will be more useful to you than merely relying on who, what, when, and where.

The most common problem with research proposals is that they are too high on the scale of abstraction : the issue is simply too big and complex to examine adequately in the space provided for the research project, let alone offer a persuasive solution. The first issue you think of when starting any project is almost certain to be too vast. The reason for that is simply that you do not know enough yet; the less you know about a topic, the simpler it looks, and the fewer details you think you will need to discuss. In principle, what that means is you need to do a bunch of research before you settle on your focus. In practical terms, what that means for this assignment is that you should put a lot of work into Part 2 before you even attempt Part 1.

As always, follow the Format Rules.

Bring four hard-copies with you to class.