Index

Unit Four: The Researched Paper

The Task:  While reading Baldwin’s essays and conducting Group Research projects, the class has covered roughly twenty-five years of the Civil Rights Movement, from 1943 (riots in Detroit and Harlem) to 1968 (the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.).  Your task in this paper is to choose one topic associated with the Civil Rights Movement—a theme, an event, a person—research the topic, and show how this topic informs or operates within one or more of Baldwin’s essays.  In many ways, this assignment resembles the second paper assignment, but it differs in two ways:

  • The paper should reflect contemporary scholarship treating its topic.  In other words, you will need to find and use relevant scholarly articles—though not to the exclusion of the types of sources you’ve used in prior work for this course.
  • Instead of relating your research to specific mention in a specific essay, you may tie the research to a theme or concern you see circulating through one or more of the essays.  If you choose to approach the paper from this angle, please remember that you will still need to work directly with portions of Baldwin’s writing.  You can work with any portion of Baldwin’s writing, including essays we haven’t read for this class.

Length:  8-10 full pages.  Longer papers are acceptable, though extra length doesn’t guarantee a better paper or higher grade; papers significantly short of the minimum risk failing.

Format:  MLA.  Your paper should provide a complete and accurate Works Cited page, and it should follow MLA in-text citation rules, which you have practiced throughout the semester.

Due Dates:  Drafts (see requirements below) are due Tuesday, April 27, at the beginning of class.  I will have no pity for those who fail to have full drafts on hand for review at this time.

Guidelines:  You are more than welcome to develop a topic you began to research in your second paper or in one of the group research projects; you may also choose any group research project topic, even if you didn’t work on it originally.  Nor are you restricted to these topics.  If you can demonstrate that your topic is relevant to the Civil Rights Movement, and relevant to one of Baldwin’s essays, the topic is acceptable.

Points of Emphasis:  1) Your paper must be analytical rather than a report; in other words, as you correlate the findings of your research with Baldwin’s writing, you must make and support an analytical claim; 2) Your paper should focus on a specific element of your topic, rather than provide a broad overview (as an example, no 8-10 page paper can adequately come to terms with the entire life and career of Martin Luther King, Jr.).  As you conduct your research for the third paper, your primary goal should be to narrow your topic to a specific issue that you can analyze in depth in roughly 3000-3500 words.

Tips:  1) Save everything from the research you do for the third paper.  Information and citations that may seem irrelevant at first often have a way of coming back to haunt the researcher who discards them; 2) I will be compiling and posting a collective Works Cited based on submissions for individual papers and group research projects; consult this as it becomes available; 3) Do not hesitate to consult me about topics, search strategies, ways to connect your research with Baldwin’s essays, and the like.  If you cannot come to my office hours, email me at gardner_rogers@sbcglobal.net to arrange an appointment; 4) Start drafting this paper as soon as you can; you should expect that you will need to make extensive revisions of the first draft; 5) Don’t be surprised if you find that you need to do some additional research as you narrow your topic.

Grading Criteria

When I read and grade your papers, I will look for and reward the following:

--A complex thesis (as defined and practiced in the second paper) that joins specific claims;

--The paper should support this specific analytical claim rather than offer generalized information;

--The paper should make a significant and plausible connection to some element of Baldwin’s work;

--The paper should use sources to make its own points rather than “dump” source information without explanation or analysis;

--While I don’t have in mind a minimum number of sources, I do expect to see papers relying on multiple sources—not just two or three; I also expect to see a variety of sources, including magazine and newspaper articles, relevant scholarly journal articles, relevant statistics from government documents, polls and surveys, and the like, and (when relevant) testimony from participants in the Civil Rights Movement.

--The paper should provide a coherent organization, with clear transitions from one idea to the next;

--Each paragraph of the paper should be coherent and developed (beware the two-sentence paragraph, which usually signals an idea that hasn’t been thought through completely);

--The prose should be clear, grammatically correct, and free of excess verbiage; it should relay on active and specific verbs; wherever possible, it should use concrete nouns rather than vague abstractions;

--The paper should follow MLA guidelines to the letter, both in its Works Cited page and in its in-text citations.