The research project will begin with an idea generation exercise. Your research project will be based on a topic of your own choosing. This adds the challenge of narrowing down a topic to research that will be interesting enough to sustain for the remainder of the semester, and worthy of intense study.

Research papers will be 3-4 pages long, and will be persuasive. This means that you must have a single, argumentative thesis statement that focuses your paper.

You will want to consider this when choosing a research topic: "all about" papers that focus on many different aspects of a topic will not meet the requirements for this project.

Because everyone is choosing his or her own topic, the sources that are used for these research papers will vary widely. Some topics may require academic, peer reviewed journal articles, while others may be approached by finding popular, less formal sources.

Part of the difficulty in this assignment, therefore, is to find sources that are reliable and appropriate for your purposes. Each paper must use a minimum of 2 sources.