So the Research Project is due May 3. Let’s revisit the prompt and talk about the things you should have in order soon:

• By this point you should have a good research question that is direct, answerable, rich, and focused enough to eventually develop a thesis in response. You don’t need your thesis immediately, but by the time you have a full draft you should have a decent thesis. By the time you can revise (I am hoping you have time to revise), you should be reading with a central argument (i.e., thesis) that the paper makes.
• Have at least 5 sources that help you address a research question. These sources should have been read closely. The Reflective Annotated Bibliography is a great assignment to help you understand your sources better and how to use them to make an argument. When you have a central argument, these sources are used to support claims you make that help make that argument.
• Once you have a good idea for your thesis, make sure each paragraph and each use of a source always relates back to what your central argument is for the paper.
• Integrate the references to your sources with your own voice as a writer (more on that soon).
• Make sure you have a documentation style picked out, think about conventions of research writing discussed in class, and try to apply them whenever writing with sources and making claims based on your research.
• Think about important concepts we have gone over throughout the semester: organizing your argument well, joining claims to evidence, paying attention to style (word choice, sentence type variety, sentence length variety, using punctuation rhetorically, sentence coherence, etc.), paragraphing, etc.