Audience: Your instructor is your audience, as an academic reader.
Topic Areas: You must write a research paper that reflects some aspect of the literature covered this semester.
- How did new technology in World War I (like gas warfare and long-range artillery) contribute to the horrors soldiers experienced, like those depicted in the novel All Quiet on the Western Front
Format: Use MLA (Modern Language Association) format, including essay title.
Organization: Your essay must have a thesis sentence, topic sentences, and well organized, well-supported paragraphs. Use both summary and direct quotation for support. Your essay’s paragraph and overall structure must be coherent.
Documentation: Proper documentation is a major goal of this assignment. Correct use of in-text documentation and works cited page is expected. All directly quoted, paraphrased and summarized material used in the paper must be correctly identified and documented, including (when available) page numbers (for the novel and researched material) and line numbers (for the play).
Sources: To earn a passing grade on this project, you must use at least five sources in your completed essay. These sources must be clearly documented in the body of the paper and on the works cited page.
Better sources will be from the college library’s collection. These sources can include articles from the college’s electronic databases (such as Artemis Literary Sources) and books from the college’s catalog (some of which can be accessed electronically).
A Good Starting Point is the Library’s Study Guides.
For Remarque, see http://libguides.aacc.edu/allquiet (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..
Evaluation of Sources: All sources used in your paper must meet the standards expected for a college-level essay. As such, general sources, such as a general encyclopedia (like Wikipedia), popular magazines (like People), and high school study sites (like Spartacus) are of no value and will lower your paper’s final grade.
Incorporation of Sources: Good research papers will 1) show careful consideration of the ideas in the material used in the essay, 2) use both summary and direct quotation for support, with both types of support clearly documented, and 3) create a coherent discussion that effectively uses thesis, topic sentences, paragraphs, and transitions.
Plagiarism: Quotations, paraphrases, and summaries must be correctly documented. Failure to do so is plagiarism. Students who commit an act of plagiarism on any assignment will fail the course as a whole and be subject to academic discipline as per the course policy and the college’s current Catalog.
College-level Language: Your audience should be a college-level reader. As such, the word choice used in your essay should be formal rather than informal. There should not be any typos, misspelled words, grammatical errors or punctuation errors.
