Documentary Report on ARIA Resort and Casino Resources

For your final out-of-class paper assignment, you will draw on both primary and secondary research to write your own “documentary report.” Your aim is to document your subjects’ lives as fully as you can, and as faithfully as you can. Your report needs to be authoritative, based on facts and evidence and first-hand observation. And it needs to be revealing—you need to dig beyond the surface to discover truths that might not be obvious to the casual bystander.

The subject of your documentary report is fairly open, but it must be something/someone you can investigate in person, and you must not write about the same person you wrote on for your Family History Narrative paper.* Consider focusing on one of the following:

• an intriguing local place (as Amanda Coyne does in “The Long Good-Bye”). It must be a public place, such as a government or campus building, or possibly a store or other place of business (see Gladwell’s “The Science of Shopping”).  
• an organization—a campus club, a research lab, a local business.
• a significant recent event. If you choose an event, you must either be able to rely on your own personal observations of the event or you must be able to interview multiple people who were there.

                        Topic . (~100 words) In a brief paragraph of about 100 words, explain the subject of your documentary report, why you have made this choice, what you already know about it, and how you plan to go about gathering both primary and secondary material.

                        Progress Report with Annotated Bibliography –(~400-500 words + bibiography; 25 points). Explain what research you have conducted so far—people you have interviewed or spoken with, observations you have made, photographs you have taken, documents you have collected, etc. What problems have you encountered so far? How do you plan to solve those problems? What research do you have left to do? What are the most interesting results have you found so far?

ALSO…List (in correct bibliographical format for MLA or APA) sources you have or plan to use for this paper, with brief description of each, explaining what it contributes (or what you think it will contribute) to your research. 

                        Complete Draft #1 Due (including Works Cited or References list)

Research:

You will begin with field research: observe, talk to people, take notes on what you see and hear. You will then do background research to gather facts, statistics, historical/geographical information. And finally, you will want to ground your essay in a theoretical context—some larger idea/principle/theory that helps to explain the significance of what you have observed (you may rely, for example, on Robert Coles’ essay on documentary work).

Graphics/Photographs:

You must include at least one image of some sort. This must be either your own photograph or graphic art OR that of one of your interview subjects.

 Audience:

You should write for a general, well-educated audience (perhaps the same readers who would have read Tom Junod’s “The Falling Man,” Amanda Coyne’s “The Long Good-Bye,” or Dave Eggers’ “The Actual Hollister”).

Sources:

There is no minimum or maximum number of sources required for this assignment.  Successful papers will usually have between 6 and 15 sources, but you should not rely on quantity as a guide in doing your research.  You must do enough research to write an authoritative, upper-division research paper on the topic you choose.

Length: ~2000–2500 words (around 8­–10 pages)

Documentation:

Integrate your source material smoothly, using signal phrases (“according to…” etc.), and thoroughly documenting your sources using either MLA or APA documentation style. Be careful to avoid plagiarizing your sources; see the handout from Student Judicial Affairs on Canvas Resources. Rely on a reputable reference guide to get the details of documentation correct. The Purdue Online Writing Lab is a good source: http://owl(dot)english(dot)purdue(dot)edu/owl/section/2/.