15 Jan APA format has been observed

Week 8 Final Paper

Your final paper should be 2400-3500 words, and use 5 academic resources. It must be impeccably cited and formatted. End references are required, and APA (except for the cover page–not required) should be followed.

Guidelines

These Guidelines give you broad descriptions. Details regarding your assignments can be found in the weekly assignment tabs.

Your final project will consist of the following major milestone assignments:

Project Proposal

Annotated Bibliography

Rough Draft

Final paper

Final Presentation

The following are guidelines to assist you in completing the course successfully.

Guidelines for the Proposal (50 points)

A proposal offers a detailed and full description of your project (as best you know it at the time of writing) in no more approximately 700 words. To succeed, students will need to find at least one source of information related to their topics. Students may work with their professors to identify areas of inquiry or may accept a topic and focus from the list. Understand that you are making a best effort to describe your project early on, but allow yourself to be open to growth and change as you conduct research and focus your intentions.

Guidelines for the Annotated Bibliography (75 points)

Good annotations make for excellent papers. You are required to annotate five academic scholarly resources in Week 4. A scholarly resource is written by an academic scholar, holding a Ph.D. or other terminal degree, is published in a multi-volume, peer-reviewed journal, and has ample references of its own. Successful annotations begin with your introduction (to the best extent you know it at that point in time), capture publication details, briefly summarize a text, locate key terms, find controversies to analyze and evaluate, and assist in the creation of new knowledge.

Guidelines for the Draft (85 points)

Your draft should be a largely finished product, impeccably formatted, and nearly complete. It should have all the APA citation and referencing fully in place. In length, it should be 1200-1750 words in length and double spaced.

Guidelines for the Final Paper (200 points)

The essay must be 2400-3500 words in length (not including the title or reference pages) and double spaced. The margins should be no more than one inch (right and left). The essay should be composed in 12-point Times New Roman font. Include a minimum of five scholarly sources. Other sources may also be used, but at least five sources must be academic and scholarly. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, websites ending with the .gov, .org, or .edu, newspapers or other media sources do not constitute scholarship. All of the sources must be documented and cited using APA format.

Criteria

Introduction/Thesis

There is a clear and focused introduction. The thesis is clear, original, and sophisticated. The ideas embedded in the thesis are appropriate to the length of the assignment (for the proposal 2-3; draft 1, 5-7; final, 9-10). Word count excludes title and reference pages). The content provides quality (not padded, dull writing, repetitive or margin/enlarged font-cheating). Effort and sensitivity to the study is evident.

Paragraphs

Paragraphs are composed around topics, which naturally and organically emerge from a complex, focused, and sophisticated thesis. Each paragraph explores one topic and one topic only. Topics directly relate TO the thesis and are not theses in and of themselves. The paragraph completely and fully develops and explains the topic and provides details, examples, illustrations, and quotations from research as well as from the primary texts. Topics and paragraphs rise above commonplace thinking and summary. Quoted material is used powerfully to support analytical points (and not as padding). There is a graceful transition to the next paragraph. The ideas explored are significant, substantive, and instructive. Ideas/topics support the overarching thesis so that the paper is a unified whole, and not a concatenation of appended mini-essays.

Grammar/Mechanics/Style

Grammar refers to the correct usage of Standard American English. Mechanics refers to idiomatic conventions (capitalization of proper nouns, spelling, and punctuation). Style refers to persuasiveness, sophistication, wit, and transcendent quality. Sentences should be varied in length and complexity without loss of clarity or precision of meaning. Style makes a paper a pleasure to read.

Format

APA format has been observed. Headers, margins (1″ all around), alignment, double-spacing, Times New Roman font and 12 pt. font size are correct. Pagination is in the upper right of the page. Citations are scrupulously observed in-text and have a matching full reference on a reference page with hanging indents (also formatted correctly—double spaced in TNR 12 point font) Both in-text and full references are complete according to the APA style sheet.

Writing for the Humanities

Composing for the humanities is “technical” in its own way. Students are to read broadly in philosophy, art, literature, political science, and history; and are to show that they can bridge conceptually across humanistic inquiry, innovate meanings that are not apparent at the surface of texts, locate controversies and conflicts that are worthy of researched exploration, and show depth and focus of contemplative thought and character in conducting work of this kind. Progress throughout these assignments is also valued