Research Paper:
Instructions:
PLANNING:
Planning is often called “prewriting” and includes brainstorming, journaling, outlining, designing, collaborating, and researching. Allowing space for discovery, writers plan their compositions by defining a topic, establishing a thesis, and organizing their thoughts before producing a rough draft.
While most writers draft compositions alone, many writers collaborate with others before writing. Student writers may visit their professors, tutors, or writing center coaches to build their composition outlines. Professional writers in academics and workplaces collaborate to co-author scholarly articles, books, and reports. They develop a collaboration plan, identify strengths and weaknesses within a group, and assign roles to produce a co-authored text. Collaborating also involves examining models, using artificial intelligence tools, and noting patterns within successful writing samples.
Writers need reliable information to support their compositions. A writer’s personal experience and source material provide support, but compositions such as research reports require additional sources, including books and peer reviewed publications. This requires writers to locate sources, construct and analyze their notes, and interpret ideas before writing a rough draft.
LITERARY WORK:
For this paper assignment, you are required to analyze and interpret a work of literature. Now that you have completed Lessons 1013, you should know how to think like a literary scholar and write a literary studies paper. Remember, analyzing means deconstructing or taking something apart, looking at individual elements that construct a whole idea or thing. Interpretation means exploring the meaning of the parts and the whole.
For this paper assignment, I’ve selected Rhett Lloyd’s short story This recently published short story captures a young man’s life experiences as he tries to choose a perfect wedding ring for his fiancee.
STEP 1: LEARN THE SCOPE OF OUR ASSIGNMENT
To begin your Literacy Narrative, I recommend you learn the SCOPE of the assignment. The scope of an assignment includes objectives, requirements, logistics, and expectations.
In business settings, employees commonly define project scope as the part of project planning that involves determining and documenting a list of specific project goals, deliverables, tasks, costs, and deadlines. We do the same in academic settings. Take out a sheet of paper and handwrite answers to the following questions:
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- What are my goals for this assignment?
- What must I deliver to myself and Dr. Bodily?
- How do I deliver these artifacts?
- What are my costs in terms of time, money, pleasure?
- How do I overcome challenges to fulfilling this assignment before its deadline?
STEP 2: UTILIZE WRITING HEURISTICS
Writers use various heuristics to prepare them for planning a rough draft. Heuristics are learning tools such as memory aids, graphic organizers, and problem solving tools. Consider these models:
STEP 3: SUBMIT YOUR PLANNING ARTIFACTS
Planning artifacts include all notes, prewriting, brainstorming, journaling, collaboration meeting minutes, sketches, and writing heuristics you created during the planning phase.
DRAFTING
Drafting includes writing an informal composition or the rough draft. Many writers focus on generating ideas and creating content, allowing ideas to flow freely without worrying about grammar, punctuation, organization, and clear prose. The most effective writers just write. They create introductions, body paragraphs, conclusions while they write, but they worry less about adding works cited pages, tables, graphics, and visual aids until the draft is complete.
Writers feeling pinched for time may draft-editthat is, they write and edit simultaneously. They write a sentence then edit; add another sentence then edit sentences; write a paragraph then edit the paragraph; and so forth. This breaks a writers flow, inhibits thinking, encourages forgetfulness, and usually requires more time overall if a writer wants to create a high-quality composition.
I recommend handwriting your rough draft. You can scan or dictate your writing into a word processor. Handwriting empowers your mind and flow by reducing interference due to typing or draft-editing. Studies show writers who type produce more words than hand-writers which means handwriting ensures concise writing in less time.
Formatting means organizing your rough draft into a predetermined form using headings, titles, margins, font, pagination, line spacing, and so forth. If you are writing for the humanities, you will write in MLA Style, but if you are writing a psychology paper, you will write in APA style. Historians write in Chicago Style and biologists and chemists often write in CSE style. Journalists use the Associated Press style. So, as you can see, your field determines your documentation style.
We will use MLA Style for our Literacy Narrative, but we will not need to cite sources and produce a Works Cited page.
REVISING:
Revising includes reading a rough draft to improve its structure and content. Writers add, remove, replace, and rearrange content. They rewrite sections to ensure strong development, clarity, cohesion, flow, tone, and language. Writers question their assumptions, test source validity, and anticipate how audiences will receive their drafts.
EDITING:
Editing involves reading a revised draft to ensure accurate grammatical, mechanical, punctuation, and formatting. Writers often edit their own compositions then hire an editor. Professional editors provide various editing services based on the writers request and budget.
PUBLISHING:
Publishing involves submitting a polished draft to a professor, boss, or publisher. After editing, writers and editors will proofread drafts to ensure they are ready for submission to a professor, client, supervisor, or a publication. They will ensure the draft is formatted correctly according to publisher requirements and all elements are present.
Publishing connects writers to readers. Peer reviewed publications are considered credible, including reviewed open-access journals, institutional repositories, and platforms like SSRN. A few writers self-publish through websites or printing services; however, self-publishing creates skepticism when writers attempt to publish through websites or vanity presses, bypassing the peer review process.