Final Paper Instruction

Your final paper is built up around the various components of you assembled throughout the course.  As you’ve done various components of the work, the final version has you assembling for use.  Below each section, I note where you can look back to because you’ve already begun the vast majority of these parts, now it’s assembling, expansion, and editing.

This may seem a bit odd because it’s not really a “paper” in the sense you’re used to which, yes, that’s correct.  But the process here is actually the core process that is used by the majority of researchers as we begin our own studies: we have an idea, get some basic understanding of its scope, read some literature to get a handle on the state of the field and broader/deeper knowledge of the topic, and form some beginning hypotheses from this to get us grounded on what we actually know and what we want to know.

For your final paper, you will need to submit a document that contain the following sections.  These should be formatted generally in APA style:

• Double-spaced
• Size 12 font
• Times New Roman
• Hanging indent/alphabetical references list
• A cover page
  • remember to do the correct running head style
• Page numbers on all pages
• Make sure your name is on the first page
• Regarding length: I’m less concerned with a specific word count than I am about thoroughness. You have 5 annotations you’re completing, which are often around 2/3 of a page each (so, it’ll probably be around 3.5 pages). The intro is somewhere between 1/2 and 1 page. And the hypothesis section is 1/4 to a 1/2 page in length. This gives you a rough idea butcontent is more important than just having your paper be a certain length.

Paper structure

• Simple Introduction
  • Your introduction should introduce the reader to the general aspects of your topic.  In this, I want you to present that topic you’ve been interested in, noting a research question and the logic/reasoning that you’re interested in this topic.  Additionally, you mustinclude a point drawn from either one of the data sites presented in the final week or from a trustworthy news source that gives some insight into the scale of the problem that you’re interested in.  For example, if your paper is about college drinking, you’d want some sort of basic statistic that says what percent of college students drink (or, you could even fine tune it a bit further and do what percent of college students binge drink).  This is so your reader/audience can understand and draw a sort of why is this an important topic.  Make sure this is cohesive enough that the next section.
• • • Basic items from earlier weeks to use as the basis here:Project Idea from Week 3
  • Annotated Bibliography
    • Rather than have you assemble a literature review that links your articles together, you will need to do an annotated bibliography of your articles.  For this, you will need a total of fiveacademic, peer-reviewed articles (note: you’ve already found 3, so you’ll just expand on them as you find two more!).  For these five articles, they can address the variables you’re interested in varying amounts.  So, you could have two articles about race, only one on gender, and two on age.  Each of annotations need to be a fully fleshed out annotated bibliography.
    • The best resource on this is OWL Purdue: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/614/03/(Links to an external site.)
      • (Links to an external site.)Now, an important note is their annotation examples highlight a few different types: MLA, APA, and Chicago.  The APA approach doesn’t include a reflection for using it in your own work (this is because the annotated bibliographies are meant to be a repository for your own use so that, if you’re writing another paper in the future and think you want to use a reference again, you can review your own notes to see if it’ll be useful).  For this project, I want you to use the MLA approach to annotations: “a summary, an evaluation of the text, and a reflection on its applicability to his/her own research” (The Writing Lab, 2017).  All five must have these 3 sections.
    • • • Basic items from earlier weeks to use as the basis here:Project Idea from Week 3; Finding (and Using) Relevant Literature
      • Hypotheses
        • The last items that I want you to develop in this are a set of three hypothesesbuilt from the literature.  So, you’ve already spent some time on your articles and thinking about your topic and variables over the week.  You’re going to end the components of this by articulating specific hypotheses from the literature you just assembled that would guide your own research.  You don’t need to go into heavy or long explanations on this but the when your reader/audience sees your hypotheses, the annotations they just read should prime them on these.  Basically, do these hypotheses connect to the annotations that I just read or do they seem to come out of left field.
      • • • Basic items from earlier weeks to use as the basis here:Lecture Week 3: The Importance of Getting the Hypotheses Right
        • References
          • And, finally, a full references list that is correctly formatted.  Remember, this will have sixentries (your five articles and the background source from your introduction).

Rubric

Final Paper