Research Paper Assignment

Write a paper advocating a particular public action regarding your issue. By "public action" I mean some authority coming to a decision about a public policy. The authority might be a city council, a state legislature, the electorate of a particular area, a committee, or even an individual, such as a governor or mayor. Your audience is that authority: the person or group who will decide whether or not to enact the particular policy addressing your issue.

Your paper should include the following parts, which I will discuss in this unit's VoiceThread lecture:

• Exigence/thesis
• history of the specific policy issue
• Your arguments
• Refutation
• Conclusion
• Works Cited and Consulted

This paper requires research. It must be documented according to the MLA style, and you should use in-text citations.

There is no required length for the paper. However, as a general rule, you should think of 2000 words as a minimum (that's 6 to 7 typed pages), not including your Works Cited and Consulted. If your paper is much shorter than that, you should think about whether you have done as thorough a job as you could.

Similarly, you should think of five cited sources and ten more consulted sources as a rule of thumb. If your complete bibliography has fewer than fifteen sources, you should worry that you have not become an expert on your issue.

At least two peer-reviewed, scholarly articles must be among your sources. At least one of those must be cited in your paper-either paraphrased or quoted.