1. What is your proposed focus or topic for the paper?
A topic can serve as the frame of your paper, the subject that you are going to home in on. Try to think what might be the boundaries of your topic—its beginning and its end, the cast of characters, the subtopics or related topics you might bring in.
- Topic
- Issue(s)
- Location
- Time frame
2. What is your core question? What do you want to know? And why would other people be interested to learn from you about this question? Note: Questions that ask “what” are usually less interesting than “how” or “why” questions.
3. Recommended: What might be an argument you would like to test? If you already have an idea of a hypothesis you would like to test, feel free to put it here. An argument or hypothesis is quite different from an opinion. Rather, it is based in evidence and careful attention to your terms, structure, and conclusions. Your job is to find the evidence that shows the pros and cons of different ways of thinking about this issue.
4. Evidence: try to provide a rough road map of how you will find your evidence. What sources will you examine? How will you collect your data? How will you keep track of what you have found?
5. Secondary sources: If you have already found secondary sources on your topic, please list them here. If not, how will you find them? Ideally you should have at least three scholarly articles on your topic. If you are working on a topic that is unfolding in news media and hence there is not yet much scholarly work, see if you can find a few scholarly articles that model the kind of article you would like to write.
6. Length can be variable. It should be a minimum of 2–3 pages, double-spaced. I prefer submission in Word because then I can give direct comments more easily. Feel to free to go as far as you can in thinking about your research plan. Some of you may even begin to formulate outlines, including the subtopics that may form sections of your paper. The further you go at this point, the easier your research and writing will be later.
