Research paper: Lisa Wingate’s ‘Before We Were Yours'

RESEARCH PAPER PROPOSAL GUIDELINES
This document is intended to assist you in planning your paper, and your proposal is not a short version of your paper. It is more like an outline. The following points should be followed, but usually the document should not exceed two full pages. If necessary, you may use single space for this assignment.
PART I. PURPOSE AND SCOPE
This portion of your proposal will explain the goal of your paper, i.e. what the paper attempts to achieve and through what means. Typically, a research paper provides a particular interpretation of a literary work using published scholarship for support. For our project, you could interpret a poem or a group of poems, a play, or a novel listed on the syllabus. You could focus on a theme, a character, or a literary technique. Make sure you have the following for this part:
❖ What is the literary work you are working on?
❖ What is your thesis statement?
❖ What is your critical approach to the subject?
You may simply answer the above questions in one sentence each and long, drawn out narratives should be avoided.
Note: For a description of the critical approaches to literature, see Chapter 51 of the textbook, on pages 1641-1662.
PART II. SOURCES
You must list a minimum of three sources in MLA format that you plan to use in your paper in the MLA format. However, it will take more than three sources for you to do an above-the-average job. This means that if you are planning on a stronger proposal, you should have five to six sources or more. A source is usually defined as one literary article, which could be from a newspaper, a magazine, or more frequently a scholarly journal. You may also cite from a book. If you cite from an anthology or collection of critical essays, each entry will be regarded as one source. The best sources are a combination of different types, not just one kind of publication. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and study guides such as SparkNotes may be useful, but are not considered strong sources for this assignment.
PART III. SOURCE SUMMARY
You should provide a succinct summary for each source you plan to use. Understandably, you may be exploring certain sources at this early stage, but may not end up using them for the writing of your paper. This is fine. You may find more and better sources later on and decide to cite them in your paper instead, but you do not need to provide summaries for these sources when you turn in your research paper.