Essay Outlines
(Research Proposals)
- The title of your project
- What you want to prove
- Why this needs to be proved
- How you will prove it
- Five references. (You will need more for the actual paper.)
Of your five references at least three should be dealing specifically with your topic. For example, if your essay is on the cooking channel on TV, then you must find at least five academic references about the cooking channel. References about TV or about cooking are among the type that will not be counted among the required five. An academic reference is an academic book or an article in an academic journal. If in doubt as to whether your reference is academic, check with your tutorial leader (or, in SSC 199, the professor). As a rule of thumb, all books and journals held by the Robarts Library or the various college libraries are academic. Some online texts also qualify as academic references, but to be sure please check with your tutorial leader (or, in SSC 199, the professor).
Please hand in your essay or report outline at the end of class on the due date. Email submissions will NOT be accepted.
If your outline is not approved you will be told within a week of handing it in.
Approval of your outline constitutes permission for you to go ahead with the essay or research topic. Our approval of your topic does not mean that we approve of your method of research or any other aspect of your work, except for the topic itself. If the course has tutorials, please attend regularly. You can also arrange to see the teaching assistant on an individual basis. And you can always see the professor during office hours or by appointment.
Please note that no essays will be accepted from students who have not had their topic approved in advance. If you miss the deadline given in the syllabus for either the outline or the essay itself, then you must follow the instructions for late assignments given elsewhere on this web site. Delays without a valid excuse will not be accepted and will result in an essay/report mark of 0.
Please note that no proposals can be accepted by email. If you submit your proposal by email it will be handled as if it had not been submitted at all.
Appropriate topics
Topics that are relevant to this course belong to the social sciences and humanities. An example of an irrelevant topic: "I will show that Prozac does not work as a treatment for depression in adolescents." Solution: Choose another topic.
Do not write a paper that focuses on how things are defined. Examples: "I will show that many things that are not considered to be pornography actually are;" "Jazz is no longer part of popular culture." Solution: Choose another topic.
Do not discuss what is good and what is bad. Do not suggest how society can be improved. An ethical motivation is commendable, and an ethical and political bias is inevitable, and you should not pretend that you do not have them. However, your motivation and your bias should not also be your topic. Topics to avoid: "Women's image in society has improved, as seen in recent advertising;" "Motorcycle gangsters are not all evil criminals;" "Drugs are not the main thing at a rave." Solution: Change your topic, or rework it, making your motivation or bias less obvious.
Be critical in examining your topic. The objective of the course is to examine what we take for granted. Do not take any ideas for granted: not mainstream "bourgeois ideas," not oppositional ideas, not the traditions of your own subculture. The most worthwhile papers are often ones where the student examines critically their own life. Being critical in this sense does not mean being negative. It just means not believing things before your check them out. The first step in that direction is to look seriously at the opinions you hold. What have you been believing simply because others around you believe it?
A typical example where being uncritical could be a problem: "I will describe the history of rave culture" - unless you are going to be critical of (though not necessarily negative about!) the "official history" that is part of rave culture itself. (This could be a good topic if you take a critical position and relate it to the central theme of the course.) Solution: be critical.