This is your first official step in a writing process that will culminate in your having completed a seminar paper of significant length.

The proposal should be a formal abstract, clearly laying out your thesis, critical approach, and any external sources or topics you plan to include.

Ultimately, your paper should be an argument, so this abstract should make it clear what you're arguing by forecasting your structure as much as possible. Furthermore, you should demonstrate a sense of what is at stake for your discussion: are you planning to shake the foundations of the academy, or offer a better understanding of a specific text?

Prepare your proposal using a formal style, but also feel free to adopt a personal point of view. In other words, phrases like, "In this paper, I will..." are not off limits.

Finally, not only is your paper an argument, your proposal is an also an argument that your paper topic is a good one. Your peers will be reviewing your proposal (as will I), and offering you feedback. It might be the case that you decide to change your topic after hearing some feedback, and I might even reject your topic outright (this is unlikely). So your incentive to prepare a strong and persuasive proposal is that failing to do so in a satisfactory way will mean more work for you later.

At a minimum, your proposal should include the following three elements:

1. A clear statement of the topic and thesis of your paper
2. A coherent discussion of your paper's planned structure (outline)
3. A tentative bibliography of at least three entries

Doing this well should require at least 400 - 600 words.

Evaluation

This proposal is graded as part of your seminar paper (a total of 350 points). This assignment is worth

Your proposal will be posted online, like everything else for this course. To submit it, click on "Proposal" under "Create Content", and simply paste the contents of your proposal there.

This is due no later than 9:00 AM on Friday, February 12.

Note: These will be listed on the front page of the website, but are not technically "blog entries."

Option: If you want, you may use the biblio tools in our class website. Within the body of your proposal, you may include some specific markup tat will automatically generate a citation for a work in our bibliography. Simply look up the item's "Citation Key," and include it between an opening and closing "[bib]" tag. Place this markup where you want it to generate a footnote reference link.