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tags: course support
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# EXPOS20Alqera Workshop

Where: LL Studio
When: 4/19 10:30am and 1:15pm
Enrollment: 30
[Project log]()
[Syllabus](https://airtable.com/appOgUGNrRPyW0xRm/tblF0oKLCPhK6TnAe/viwxouIdoOK1PvsTF/recIl3JRDbYe4phq3/flde6CJXApRaFoOpC/attuqChkYnsCm6Wiv?blocks=hide)

## Assignment prompt

Unit 3: The Research Paper

10 pages

1st Draft Due: April 17, 5 pm

Final, Revised Draft Due: May 6, 12 pm

The Assignment

In our first unit, we looked at material and literary artifacts of historical societies such as ancient Greece to understand how we reconstruct their oral traditions. In our second unit, we examined theories of verbal art and considered how they applied to modern oral performances such as rap and Spoken Word. For this final unit, we will begin to think about how oral traditions might be said to function as subversive to the dominant culture in which they operate.

Our work in this unit will be guided by the following broad questions: How do contemporary oral performances challenge conventional understandings of storytelling? How are stereotypes reinforced, challenged, or otherwise influenced by verbal art? And how might what we observe about an oral tradition shed light on a certain group or community within the larger society to which they belong? These are questions designed to guide our discussions in this unit, and no research paper will consider all of them or provide a definitive answer to any of them. Within these broad questions, it will be up to you to carve out territory that interests you.

Your task in Unit 3 will be to identify a form of verbal art or oral performance (for example, a rap song, a Slam Poetry performance, a certain tradition of oral storytelling) ask a good question about it, identify sources that will help you join an existing conversation, and analyze your chosen work to somehow advance that conversation.

Your project then, is to do the following:

Identify a performance, art, song, or story that is characterized by its verbal and oral component.

2) Research your chosen work and topics that interest you related to the work and identify a question/puzzle/problem that interests you.

3) Analyze your chosen work in some way that considers outside sources and addresses the puzzle/problem/question you have identified.

Whatever topic you choose to write about, your writing and research goals in this unit will be the following:

To learn how to locate, evaluate, and use sources from the Harvard libraries and the Harvard library electronic resources
To learn how to identify a topic, develop a research question/puzzle/problem, and answer your question in an original and interesting way.
To use at least one primary source and four secondary sources that you find yourself in your final paper
To consider and adequately respond to relevant counterarguments.
To learn how to successfully integrate multiple sources into an essay while still maintaining your own voice.
To continue to work on writing clear, intelligent prose and developing logical, convincing, well-structured arguments.
How to Begin the Research Paper

Strong research papers (like all papers) respond to good analytical questions that are worth answering. For this paper, you'll have the freedom (and responsibility) to come up with not only your own question, but also your own topic. Once you have a general topic, you'll need to identify some sources to jumpstart your investigation of that topic. Here's a checklist as you begin this process:

Choose your primary source.
For this assignment, you can choose one or more of the films on our list, or you can choose any other work of popular culture with my approval.

Research the context and come up with a question.
A strong research paper will respond to a strong question/problem/puzzle. A strong question will fit the description of the good analytical question we've discussed all semester. It should

--be answerable with the available evidence

--not have an obvious answer

--should be sufficient in scope for 10-page paper (i.e., you shouldn't bite off more than you can chew with a question like "How do oral performances today differ from oral performances in the past?” Instead you might try “How does Slam Poetry critique conventional and dominant understandings of ‘literature’ and poetry?”)

So how do you come up with a good question?

You will need to begin by choosing your primary source. Then you will want to begin to survey the literature. But which literature should you survey? This will depend on what kind of conversation you want to join. You know you are going to be focusing on how verbal art and oral tradition functions—but beyond this, you have many options.

How do you decide what “conversation” interests you?

You could begin by reading articles about your chosen work and looking for interesting claims or gaps in the existing debate about it. Is there a controversy about the text or piece worth trying to resolve?
You could, as you did for essay two, set out to test a theory or claim made by another writer about your performance or other similar performances.
You could begin by looking at other research questions on your topic and extend, rework, or respond to one of these questions. (What has another scholar asked and answered? What might add to that discussion? How could you analyze this particular performance to add to the discussion?)
You could begin with one of those really big questions ("How do oral traditions today differ from oral traditions of the past?) and then narrow it down to something more specific (one genre, one group/subculture, one performance)

Using Sources and Academic Integrity

Throughout this term, we have focused on your work with sources of different kinds, exploring and responding to counterarguments while also practicing the skills of quoting sources directly, paraphrasing, and citing. One of the most important additional elements of the research paper assignment will be the practice it gives you in finding sources, keeping track of their ideas, recording how your ideas evolve in response to theirs, and conveying to your readers which ideas are yours and which come from the other ideas you’ve read.

One of our emphases will be on the good writing practices that support doing your work with integrity and that help you avoid unintentional plagiarism. Writers sometimes focus on the details of citation format as the primary issue involved in academic integrity, and of course those details will matter for your research paper. However, doing work that meets the standards of academic integrity expected of you is as much an issue of developing a helpful system for organizing the sources you find and for recording how your own ideas develop in response to those sources. As with every assignment in our class, the research paper is designed to help you learn an effective process for managing all of those important features, introducing them to you one step at a time. Your work with our “Working with Sources Template”—more on that later— will be especially helpful in this respect.

Common Pitfalls in the Research Essay (and how we’ll avoid them):

Trying to answer an overly broad research question. In Response Paper #1 and #2 for Unit 3, you’ll have practice developing a focused question, and you’ll receive feedback from me about that question to help you refine it further.
Giving your readers a tour of your sources, rather than an argument about them. This pitfall is an easy to get caught in—you’ve found all this fascinating information, and you want to tell your readers all about it! But the point of finding that information is to use it as you develop your own idea, and then to help your readers understand the conversation among all of those sources, your own idea included. In RP #2 and in the various stages of writing your draft, you’ll keep refining what it is you will argue based on the research you’ve done. In part this happens by putting your sources in conversation with each other; you will also question your sources, finding ways your ideas might depart from theirs.
Starting with—and sticking with—a fixed idea of what your thesis is. Instead, your initial idea should evolve based on the research you do and the new information and new claims that you find; you should expect your provisional thesis to change as you draft and revise. In the multiple stages of writing your draft—and then in revising—you will have the opportunity to keep returning to your initial idea and to explore how to reshape it based on your research.
Incorporating only sources that agree with your claim. This pitfall is often called “cherry-picking” your evidence, and readers will not be convinced by arguments that ignore important counter-evidence. Your annotated bibliography (RP #2) will give you the opportunity to sort out the various roles your sources can play in your paper.
Letting your argument become the argument of one of your secondary sources. Writing a research paper in freshman year certainly doesn't require a thesis that will revolutionize the field you are writing about, but your paper's idea should be fresh enough that it doesn't strike your readers as if it's cowering in the shadow of one of your scholarly sources. In the research notes you will keep, you’ll be asked to reflect on how your own idea responds to, builds on, or differs from the ideas of your sources.

## Notes from the instructor
Number of sources, types of sources
Wants them to start outlining the paper

Goal = by the end of the class come up with a map/outline by the end of the session

By Tuesday they should know the roles of each source.

## space and gear prep
## media prep
## ll plan