SUNY Fredonia
College of Arts and Humanities
ENGL 209: Novels and Tales
Powers of Narrative
Spring 2010
Sections 11 and 12: TTh 2-3:20, Fenton 166
Office: Fenton 265; MF 9-11, 3-5, TTh 9:30-12, and by appointment; 673-3856
E-mail: simon@fredonia.edu, brucesimon18@yahoo.com
Web Page: www.fredonia.edu/department/english/simon/
ANGEL Space: https://fredonia.sln.suny.edu/default.asp

Final Research Project, Spring 2010

This page takes on three important questions about the Final Research Project: what, what for, and how to. My goal is to make this page as useful to you as possible, so let me know if it can be improved. If anything is badly worded, unclear, or missing, please contact me with constructive criticisms. Thanks.

What

The Final Research Project is your chance to propose, research, present on, and write on a topic of your choice that connects the course and your primary academic or intellectual interests in a format of your choice. You may choose to write a critical or a pedagogical essay, or do a creative or web authoring project. Or you may propose a different format and see if you can get it approved.

Whatever format you choose, you must select and use at least one of the required readings from the course and at least one of the critical studies from the course bibliography, and find and use at least two additional print secondary sources, in addition to whatever additional non-print research you want to do. And you must post a proposal on the course ANGEL group's discussion board by Monday, April 19, in which you (1) describe your option, topic, and research plans/progress; (2) provide a rationale/justification for doing what you plan; (3) ask me any questions you may have about the final research project.

Here's more on the suggested formats for the Final Research Project:

• Critical Essay format: write a critical essay of 8 to 10 pages in which you research an aspect of storytelling that brings the course together for you, using your research to help you support and justify your position on it. The goal of this option is for you to hone your analytical and persuasive skills by entering into an interpretive dialogue with other readers/critics of the text(s) and/or film(s) from the course (and perhaps also from outside it) that you have chosen to analyze.
• Pedagogical Essay format: write a pedagogical essay of 8 to 10 pages on how you'd organize a mini-unit devoted to any aspect of storytelling and on your reasons for teaching it in the way you described, drawing on your research to help you develop, support, and justify your teaching plan. The goal of this option is to make a case for the best way of teaching a set of works from the course at the upper middle school or high school level. Your essay, in other words, should not simply describe what you want to do with your class; it should explain why and justify your choices. Your essay, that is, should explain and justify your goals, methods, and modes of assessment--it should make a case for why it's important to teach students the material, concepts, and other things that you want them to learn, for why the teaching strategies you plan to use will help you achieve your goals, and for why the assessment methods you have chosen will enable you to tell to what degree students have met your goals.
• Creative format: write a story, play, series of poems, personal essay or create a work in a nontextual medium that is in significant intertextual or intermedial dialogue with at least one text from the course, along with an author's note or artist's statement of at least three pages detailing the critical issues you are addressing in it and the process that went into your composition of it. The goal of this option is to produce a creative work of your own and analyze its relation to works, genres, and media in the course. By entering into an intertextual/intermedial dialogue with other writers/artists--by relating your work to theirs using any of the modes and devices of creative writing, visual arts, music, film, or other genres/media--you will be able to get across your "take" on the other work and its contemporary relevance, on the critical issues both it and your work engage, and the narrative/poetic/dramatic/visual/aural strategies both it and your work enact.
• Web Authoring format: create an original web site or blog devoted to a specific aspect of storytelling that hasn't been treated well on the web (see the links page for an introduction to what's out there, and to help you figure out what needs to be done), which includes an essay of at least three pages detailing the critical issues you are addressing and the process that went into your construction of it, along with a bibliography of all your sources (both electronic and print). The goal of this option is for you to go beyond the usual moves (providing biographical and bibliographical information on an author, selecting quality links for further information) to fill a need/niche that is unfilled or undeveloped or not yet well done on the internet. The big idea in this format is to allow you to combine aspects of the previous three formats or choose one of them and bring your work in them/it to a (potentially much) wider audience.

What For

The final project in this course is your chance to move beyond what we do on the discussion board, in class discussions, activities, and microwritings, and in the critical essay by pursuing a research topic of your choice in some depth and presenting your findings in the form you feel is most appropriate. Think carefully about which texts, questions, and modes of analysis have most interested you over the course of the semester and invent your own line of inquiry that best allows you to integrate what you have learned in the course about reading, writing, research, and critical thinking.

How To

The first stage of the Final Project is to write a proposal and get it approved. In it, you address the what, how, and why questions every reader of a proposal is interested in: you must propose a topic and format for your project, describe specifically what you want to focus on, explain your interest in the subject, justify making it the focus of the final project, briefly lay out your research plans, and provide a bibliography of works you've already consulted in developing the proposal. In short, you must try to persuade your audience (in this case, me) that what you want to do is worth doing. As with any proposal, your job is to pique your readers' interest and get them excited about seeing the results of your research and analysis. Often, this involves laying out a key question, explaining its significance, and suggesting how your approach to answering it will improve on existing approaches. This proposal should be posted on the ANGEL discussion board no later than Monday, April 19, although you are encouraged to post it as early in April as you can. I strongly suggest you email or meet with me before you turn in your proposal, as soon as you even have a possible candidate for a final project format/topic/question. That way the email feedback I give you on your proposal (through both ANGEL mail and regular email) won't come out of the blue but instead will be part of our ongoing consultation process.

The next stage is to build on your preliminary research on your topic. Your research should begin before you turn in your proposal--a good proposal is the result of a good amount of research into what precise question to ask, who else has asked it, how they have attempted to answer it, what their answers have been, and why you are dissatisfied with any single answer. So it's not like this is a stage that happens after you've turned in your proposal and we've talked it over; it overlaps the proposal drafting stage. You should use the resources on the course ANGEL site and in the Reed library databases to help you accomplish this research. Learn how to use the interlibrary loan system and how to take advantage of advice from your professors and reference librarians. A lot of what we talk about in discussing your proposal will be research-related.

The final stage is to use your research and the feedback you have gotten on your proposal and presentation to help you develop, revise, edit, and hone your final project itself. Again, this can be an ongoing process--you shouldn't wait until your research is complete to begin drafting your project; if you think of your research and writing as going on parallel tracks and you going back and forth between them, it'll help you use your research to inform your writing and your writing to suggest new research inquiries. I'll be happy to discuss any stage of the writing process with you--from brainstorming to organizing your thoughts, from drafting to revising, from editing to proofreading--at any time in May.

So here's the assignment sheet for the Final Research Project.

Due: no later than 11:30 pm on Friday, 14 May 2010, in the FRP dropbox in the "Lessons" area on the course ANGEL site.

Format: word-processed; meeting page/word count minima laid out above in a double spaced document with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins; a heading that includes your name, the course name or number, and the date; a title that alludes to main themes of the project; formatting, bibliography, and citations (the latter two of which should appear only in the author's note if you are doing the creative format) in MLA style (see the links page for explanations and examples; the basic template is: Author. "Title of Poem, or Essay, or Story." Title of Book from which It Comes. Ed., Editor of Book [if any]. City of Publication: Publisher, Date of Publication. Page Numbers.); proper quotation format in body of paper according to MLA style (typically author's last name and page number in parentheses in body of paper--"..." (Delany 17).--and blockquote format for quotations five lines or longer).

Audience: In general, think of your immediate audience as someone who may be interested in the core issues of the course but who has not been taking this class; hence, you can't assume that your readers have read the texts you're writing on, so you have to include the kind of background that someone not taking this course would need.

Grading Criteria: Dependent on the format you've chosen, as follows:

• Critical Essay format: I will be grading this essay in terms of how well you make your case for your argument, how well you base your argument on research, analysis, and interpretation, and how well-organized and well-written your paper is. Hence I will be evaluating the coherence, validity, and persuasiveness of your paper's argument, the effectiveness of your paper's structure, and the quality of your paper's prose (diction, grammar, syntax, and punctuation) and formatting (including correct use of MLA format and set-up of bibliography).
• Pedagogical Essay format: I will be grading this essay in terms of the quality of the lesson plan itself, how well you make your case for your pedagogical goals and strategies, and how well-organized and well-written your essay is (including diction, grammar, syntax, and punctuation) and formatting (including correct use of MLA format and set-up of bibliography).
• Creative format: I will be grading your project on the quality of the creative work and of the author's note/artist's statement, the inventiveness with which your work engages the work(s), genre(s), media, and critical issue(s) from the course that it is responding to, and the quality of your writing (including diction, grammar, syntax, and punctuation) and formatting (including correct use of MLA format and set-up of bibliography).
• Web Authoring format: I will be grading your web site on the quality of its content and design, on the originality and thoughtfulness of your approach to the topic you have focused on, and on the quality of your writing (including diction, grammar, syntax, and punctuation) and formatting (including correct use of MLA format and set-up of bibliography).

ENGL 209: Novels and Tales, Spring 2010
Created: 4/8/10 6:41 pm
Last modified: 4/8/10 6:44 pm
Webmaster: Bruce Simon, Associate Professor of English, SUNY Fredonia
Feel free to explore the Fall 2004, Fall 2003, and Fall 2002 versions of this course.