Overview
These are the instructions for your final project overall. The way to approach this particular assignment is to focus on the first substantive essay section.
For first substantive essay draft, aim for at least 1200 words. Make sure to always include a references list in your drafts!
Your final project is a collection of two essays, which together must be a minimum of 4000 words (not including titles, references, etc.). These essays are set up to allow you to approach a topic of your choosing, within the parameters of somehow being related to American culture and within the context of social science, from a couple angles.
- Final paper formatting (and other) requirements:
- Citation method: APA or ASA are preferred because they include the year in-text, which is especially important. Whichever citation method you, use it correctly and consistently.
- Font: Times New Roman, size 12, double spaced.
- Page: one-inch margins.
- Word count for finalized, written work (i.e. this does not include titles, your information, references) must be at least 4000 words.
- For your sources,
- 18 sources total minimum
- 15 must be from academic, peer-reviewed journals!
The Substantive Essays
- Together, these two essays should total at bare minimum 4000 words.
- Each will address your topic in a focused manner
- You can write them as descriptive or argumentative, or a combination of both
- First Substantive Essay
- This essay will be the first sustain analysis or argument that you are making you are needing to make sure that you assemble literature on this particular issue.
- There are a couple different ways that you can feel about this. Use Glenn's essay as a model if you would like.
- It is common for the first, sustained essay in collection or books to provide necessary, empirical and historical backgrounds. The reason that this is done in collections and books is so that subsequent chapters can refer back to that without having to redefine or we explain everything every time.
- At the bare minimum, your substantive essay should provide some of this refined focus. Getting that foundational history and the underlying logic of what what's going on in detailed ways, lets your reader understand them better while also guiding them through your logic. While your reader should, of course, read your article sympathetically, making sure they see the logic you employ aids in understanding and clarity.
- You can also model off of Glenn's essay by treating this entire essay as merely descriptive. Note how the majority of this section is really focused on providing legal and social histories into this issue, further providing support to the term or concept that she's employ here. Thus, at the end of that section, the reader comes away with not only an understanding of that term and how it is an issue in American culture, but particularly how it has come to be.
- Second Substantive Essay
- Your second substantive essay can be just like the first one.
- It can be a another descriptive and/or historical approach to your issue focusing on another facet or another location or another time period.
- It can be a more argumentative essay, modeling off of Glenn second major section where she overview her case throughout that she's still pulling from the literature and the concept she addressed in the prior section, and applies them to her particular case to explain how they work. For many of you, I do expect this to probably be the approach that you use because it makes things more easy to control. You'll notice also that she begins that second major subsection with a transition that really just says, "Now onto something new. It's not actually new, but it functions to say hey we're going into a new direction, obviously will still be pulling from what we've already covered, but it's gonna be a slightly different approach and argumentation.
For modeling purposes: Glenn's essay
Glenn's introduction does a lot of useful things an introduction
- The introduction to Glenn’s essay is about 1100 words.
- as it's intended to cover the major sections and take away (which is about 4100 words together), yours wouldn't be this long. Moreover, as you're doing two standalone, you could think about how to pull out the relevant parts for each essay.
- What to emulate from Glenn
- Why this topic matters to study
- Clean and clear definition of concept/issue/topic
- Intended pathway for overall project, including what should be taken away
- these are standard things to aim for in any introduction
Your first substantive essay
- Largely look to Glenn’s second major section, “Substantive Citizenship as Local Practice” which is approximately 1400 words
- You'll also want to attend to her introduction as something to model as well, since it sets up the main questions and thesis. Additionally, as you're treating this as a stand-alone essay, you'll need a conclusion. But incorporating these two sections, it'll pull you easily toward that 2000 word minimum; she also gives a mini conclusion to this section
- She’s refining her focus, providing expanded information on the definition and general identification of the topic.
- She also provides ample literature, highlighting that concept in action.
- Note that she ends by giving a conclusion to that section, making it clear what is to be taken away; model this.
Your second substantive essay
- This next major section of Glenn’s essay can be thought of as an additional model for your second essay. This one is approximately 2700 words.
- This is the case study section of the paper
- The benefit here is that you get to actually treat this as a whole new essay. You have the benefit of everything that will have come before it, so any terms you've defined in the prior essay or specific terms you will have defined and that very introductory essay, can get used here to further your point without having to go through all the work of defining or redefining them. As you'll notice, Glenn does this quite a bit as well, really bringing in those issues and concepts that were already talked about ahead of time into this section with more detail of her case. So, for many of you, this is the exact type of structure you'll probably want to follow: a short introductory essay that gives some definitions and motivations to the project alongside those necessary components noted above; two essays that are both further refinements of that topic, one being descriptive and historical whereas the other is more applied to a case of particular interest.