Assignment 6 1 Position/Research Paper FS 101: Academic ...

Assignment 6 1 Position/Research Paper
FS 101: Academic Discourse I
Section 23: “In Our Image”
Fall 2008
Bob Roos
Home page: http://cs.allegheny.edu/~rroos/fs101F2008/
or http://cs.allegheny.edu/wiki/fs101F2008
Assignment 6: Position/Research Paper//Part 1: Thesis
Your final paper will be a “position paper/research paper” in which you will be asked to
(a) choose a “thesis,” a statement to be presented and defended based upon scholarly research
(b) identify, read, and analyze a number of scholarly sources related to your thesis
(c) write a paper (roughly five pages, not including bibliography) explaining your thesis, exploring
and analyzing what others have written on the topic, and defending your thesis based upon
your analysis.
The first step in this process is to select a thesis, and I propose a five-stage approach to this:
(1) Identify your serious interests. For instance, do you enjoy history? politics? literature (not
just “reading for pleasure,” but as a field of study)? film (again, not just as entertainment,
but as a serious topic of study)? social justice issues? gender-related issues? ecology and the
environment? animal welfare issues? biology? neuroscience? artificial intelligence? theater?
dance? communication arts? This is not an exhaustive list; I merely wanted to indicate that
there is a broad range of possible responses to my question about “serious interests.”
(2) Find something in any of the topics we’ve discussed, or that are coming up for discussion,
or that is associated with the theme of “In Our Image,” that relates or resonates with your
interests. (For instance, someone interested in gender-related issues might take exception to
the treatment of women in the play R.U.R., or with the fact that there are no significant
female roles in the movie 2001. Someone interested in theology might wonder what religious
thinkers have said about robots or artificial intelligence.)
(3) At this point, you might have an idea already for a “thesis,” or statement of purpose for your
paper. Or you might have only a vague sense of connection between a concept and one of the
works we’ve looked at. Either way, you should now enter into the most intense part of the
process: locating scholarly materials related to this combination of interests. Don’t treat this
as an hour-long exercise in playing with Google — this is hard and time-consuming. More
details are given below.
(4) Read the material you have found. Identify the relevant parts. It is not unusual for an entire
book’s worth of material to contribute a mere sentence or two to a paper such as this one —
you must sift through a large amount of material to find the nuggets of information that will
be of value to you.
(5) Finalize your thesis and start outlining your paper.
Handed out on 24 October 2008 Handout # 8

Position/Research Paper 2 Assignment 6
Finding Scholarly Sources
You can start with the Web, but don’t stop there. Sometimes there is no substitute for locating a
promising section of books in the library (e.g., the section on Mary Shelley, the section on sciencefiction
films, the section on technology and ethics), plucking books off the shelf, and searching
through the index. Here are some more concrete approaches:
[Focused search.] If you already know your thesis, you can do a very focused search for material
related to it. For instance, if you intend to examine the subject of “Frankenstein’s monster as
Everyman” you will need to look for information about “Everyman” — what are the classic literary
treatments of “Everyman”? What features does Frankenstein’s monster have that are reminiscent
of Everyman — has anyone ever written about the monster as a symbol of the ordinary person?
[Area-specific search.] If your thesis is less well-defined, you might still be able to search for
likely works that will help you narrow it down. For instance, if you want to say something about
the Golem and notions of social justice, you might need to find books in the library that talk about
the Golem. Search Google books and Google scholar for books of essays or articles that seem to be
in relevant journals. You might need to order things from EZBorrow if they are not in our library.
Use the reference in these books and articles to find more. As you read, you should jot down ideas
— this may lead you to formulate a more concise thesis.
[Source-specific search.] Choose a section of the library related to your interests and “scan
the shelves” (you can also do this via keyword search, I suppose, but sometimes your eyes can
pick up something that a search doesn’t turn up). Or choose a promising-sounding journal in the
library’s online collection of journals and do a search within its pages. Or sit down and read (or
skim through) a book specific to your topic or area of interest, looking for side-paths to explore or
references to other works. This is more of a hit-or-miss approach, but as long as you don’t devote
too much effort following a path that leads nowhere, you might find this fruitful.
For Monday: on the “Scholarly Resources” link, place at least one entry. If it is not about a
specific resource, it should at least identify a general “connection” between a topic in the course
and a possible thesis topic or area of interest.
Handout # 8 Handed out on 24 October 2008