Final Essay
Questions
- Why do federal agencies have discretionary power when deciding how to execute the federal laws that Congress and the President create?
- Explain the role social media has played in connecting interest groups to make them grow stronger as the major political parties have grown weaker.
- Describe a concrete example, in depth, of the iron triangle using a real world situation.
- How do the interest groups, congress and the bureaucracy interact in this case?
Guidelines
Content
- Length is not the most important factor in judging your paper. If you have less than 500 words, however, you probably have not explained yourself enough to achieve full credit.
- Make sure that when you turn in your paper, you have read through it in its final form. This may prove difficult to do after the many editing sessions that you have already enjoyed with it. It is often very helpful to have a friend read it through as well as this lends a fresh perspective.
Format
- Please double-space all your text. That way it is much easier for the instructor to annotate your work.
- Use 1” margins all round. Use 12 pt font. Number your pages.
Style
- Avoid clichés. (“the bottom line”, “at the end of the day”, “all in all” etc.)
- Avoid slang and informal terms of expression. (“Well, …”, “It was like, we went…”)
- Avoid rhetoric. (“How should I interpret these results?”, “I asked myself – What do people think about global warming?”)
- Do not use direct quotations in your text unless absolutely necessary. In general it is better to paraphrase or explain the ideas in your own words and simply refer to the original work.
- If you use equations in your paper, make sure that every symbol in the equation is explained. Number equations sequentially for easy referencing.
Grammar and spelling
- Don’t rely on the spelling checker to find all your spelling errors. You must also read through you document to check that “their”, “there” and “they’re”, for example, are correctly used.
- Read and re-read your manuscript. Edit it more than once or twice. Avoid the repetitious use of the same word in a sentence or a paragraph. Edit away all redundancies. I do not want to read the same information over and over again, simply expressed in a slightly different way each time. Remove unnecessary words.
References
- Cite articles by author(s) and year within your text. If there is a single author, the last name and year will suffice – e.g. (Hutchinson, 1995).
- Include the list of references at the end of your paper. Do not include references you have read but not cited. List the references alphabetically by the first author’s last name. The style of APA is preferred.
- Note- You do not need to cite main theories or concepts that we discussed in class so long as you name the key words or it’s title – e.g. “As can be seen through the power transition school…” instead of using the actual citation (Kugler, 1970).
