4/8: Planning P3

So welcome back from peer review and finalizing your proposals. Proposals were due last night (4/7) at midnight, so make sure you get your finalized proposal and annotated bibliography (P2) in ASAP if you haven’t already.

This week, we move on to the research paper itself (P3). This is the project you were proposing to do in P2. Note, however, if you want to change your topic or argument, you still can. Email me if you change your topic during the P3 process.

Recap and Small Notes from P2

Here's two issues that came up in lots of our one-on-one meetings that you should keep in mind as you move from finishing P2 to planning P3:

If you can’t think of a desired outcome you want your paper to accomplish, you do not have a specific enough argument yet. You cannot write a paper that is just “about” something–that’s an encyclopedia entry. Your paper should exist for a reason, filling some need, noting some situation, or offering some solution. While you can write a proposal without specific stakes (though it tends to sound vague), you can't write a research paper without stakes--you won't know who to write for or where to start.
Non-expert interpretive sources, like news articles about scientific studies or Wikipedia entries that summarize expert content, cannot be trusted to be entirely accurate or reliable. Often, in the process of describing the works of experts to non-expert audiences, important details (or interesting things to discuss in your future essay) get simplified away by these sorts of sources. Alternately, many interpretive sources (especially news articles) have vested interests of their own, meaning that while the stuff they're describing is real, their interpretation may not be 100% honest or straightforward. This is called spin (or spinning) when it happens in news. Thus, it's always a good idea to track information back to its original source: use the library website to get the actual study the news article, magazine, or website is talking about. Read the actual source.

Point #2 feels like something you should learn much earlier in life, but our cultural norms against discussing politics and psychology with little kids means it falls on me to break this news to you: some very popular and authoritative non-expert sources are sketchy and make money being sketchy.

One of the best ways to make a scientist or other expert mad is to read them the description of their work that appears on news websites. The exposure is great for funding and clout but hearing people misinterpret your work is just the worst.

(Image: my face the first time this happened to my work.)

Starting P3: The Numbers

P3, the research paper, is worth 25% of your total course grade. Accordingly, we take most of the rest of the semester to do it, and there are several stages and opportunities for feedback. The target length is between 2500-3000 words, with 3500 words being the maximum*. Peer review for P3 will be on 4/29-5/3 (that's right, a whole two sessions!) The paper's final version is due on May 9th.

*Why this length, you ask? It turns out, the 3000-word length is something of a magic number in arguing and academic writing. At expert conferences, like the one I'll be at this weekend, teams or individuals are often given 20 minutes to give their talk--and 20 minutes of talking, at a speech-giving pace, is about 3000 words. You'll also notice that politicians tend to give 15-20 minute stump speeches, so it's 3000 words again. The cartoons you watched as a kid (and the educational YouTube content you might watch now) usually end up at 20-23 minutes. 3000 words just naturally seems to be the amount of space you need to make a complex argument in a convincing way, without rambling on forever or, conversely, sacrificing too much personality and fun to concision. It's basically how long, on average, you have until an interested reader gets bored of your topic.

Here's a timeline for the various steps and due dates:

Step 1: Partial Drafts and Conferences

The first step in this project is to outline, continue doing research, and plan your large P3 research paper. Strategies for planning, organizing and writing take up most of the next few classes. However, there is another week of optional one-on-one Zoom meetings on the week of 4/19 to 4/22. For this one-on-one meeting, you have the option of sharing a partial draft on Canvas prior to your scheduled meeting time. These meetings are optional--if you're confidently moving along, you probably don't need these and can instead use that week without English classes to write.

If you don't need a meeting, you must still submit a partial draft (at least 2 paragraphs, or an extensive outline) on Canvas by April 22nd, to prove that you're not waiting until the last minute.

April 26 is a special class about research and representational ethics, positioned in our timeline after you've started writing but before peer review.

Step 2: Whole Drafts and Peer Review

After our meetings are over, the first complete-ish draft of P3 is due on 4/29 and peer review will begin the same day, Thursday 4/29. Peer review will be two class days--4/29 and 5/3, and you may work on your peers' drafts at any point in that 5 day span. It might take you longer to review your peers' 2500-3000 word papers than it did to review previous assignments, so you are strongly encouraged to share your draft with them on Slack by 4/28, so everyone has the full time.

Thursday 5/6 is a special "revision day," so there will be no lesson post that day--just some revision advice posted on Slack. Instead, prioritize revising your paper based on peer review results and my feedback.

Step 3: Finalizing and Submitting P3

After revising and improving your P3, the assignment box on Canvas will stay open from May 6 to May 9. You may turn in your completed, polished, and pretty P3 anytime between 5/6 and 5/9. The assignment will also allow to you re-submit if you turned in the paper early and then, for example, realized you forgot to put your name on it.

The class week immediately after this (the week of 5/10 and 5/13) will be dedicated to adapting your P3 to a blog post (specifically) and advocating for your research/work on the internet (generally.) The P3-adaptation-blog will be due Sunday, May 16.

Note that P3 will not be graded and returned to you until the semester is over--it takes me about 3 weeks to read them, and I'm not gonna skim something you worked so hard to make for me.

Timeline make sense? Good--it's also on the syllabus if you need a more calendar-like reference.

Strategies for Planning and Drafting

For a paper of this size, writing it straight, all-the-way-through in one sitting is not a practical approach, especially now that you're possibly at home and easily distracted. Instead, plan on writing each paper in chunks, and do not feel obligated to write it in the same order someone will read it. If you wake up one day and really feel motivated to do some part of your paper, do that part, even if it’s not the one that comes next.

Outlining before you begin is a good idea. A good strategy is to assemble your outline while doing all your research. Some people like to write sources or argument steps on index cards and rearrange them, some people like to draw diagrams, and some people plan in their heads. Use whatever planning strategy works for you, but make a plan before you begin writing. Keep in mind that one bullet point on your outline may seem like one paragraph now, but may need more room in reality. This is fine and normal. Paragraphs are free and you can use as many as you want.

Accordingly, while you can continue to do research while you write the paper, you should not attempt to do all your research on-the-fly as you write. You will write slower if you do this, and you will have a much harder time focusing. Learning and Explaining are very different mental processes.

The first introduction paragraph you write will not be the best one. However, you should leave it alone until you’ve written the whole paper, and then the last thing you should revise or replace is the intro.

In the “partial draft” due 4/19 to 4/22, a good strategy is to write a “dummy introduction”--an intro that works, but that we all know you’re going to replace with a nicer one later. The dummy intro keeps your paper focused as you begin writing, so you can focus more on the subsequent paragraphs. Acknowledging that this intro is a placeholder will alleviate the “staring at the cursor” problem where you’re not sure how to begin. A hot garbage intro is better than no intro.

Strategy: Writing When You Can't Brain Anymore

Monday's class will cover organizational schemes and strategies for a paper of this size, but I wanted to give you one strategy here, in the beginning, that is more practical. I call this strategy The Paragraph Machine.

Paragraphs are like cells in the body–each one has a job, and several of them might work together to do a specific task. Think of it like this: paragraphs are cells, “steps” or “chunks” in a research paper are like organs, and the whole paper is a body–a whole system of organs working together to stay alive. Next Monday will be about assembling those organs/chunks/steps, but I want to talk about how to make good cells now. See the video below:

Video Recap:

Each individual paragraph in a research paper is composed of sentences that do the following tasks, roughly in order:

Claim: usually an early sentence in the paragraph, this sentence tells us what the paragraph is setting out to demonstrate or prove.
Evidence: the outside source, thought experiment, or common sense supposition that backs up that claim and makes it real.
Warrant: the explanation of how the evidence proves the claim. This is where your intelligence and voice are most important. This is “teaching” the audience.
(Backing): the thing that makes the warrant work on the audience. It’s in (parenthesis) because this is not always said openly, and is based on your knowledge of the audience’s needs, concerns, existing knowledge, and ideology. This includes all sorts of choices about how to teach your readers, from choosing a story vs. a statistic, to what kind of evidence your reader will take seriously.
Optional: Counterclaims: the counterarguments that a reader or interested party might think of to contest your claim at this point.
Optional: Rebuttal: your attempt to handle the counterclaim by disproving it, proving it isn’t relevant, or explaining how it doesn’t apply in this situation.

The presence of parts 5 and 6 illustrate an important strategy: you should always deal with opposing arguments and counterarguments as they emerge for the reader, and not save them for the end of the whole paper. It is a very bad idea to put this off, trying to lump them all together near the end of the paper, and dealing with it then. Your reader will get distracted and frustrated if you don’t answer their reasonable concerns, doubts, or questions as they think of them. It is often helpful to ask your peers to identify these moments of unanswered reader concerns or questions, as it’s hard to imagine this while writing.

Use this checklist to create functional paragraphs when you’re too tired to write naturally. You can come back and make the paragraph shinier when you’re feeling more energized.

Homework

There's a Slack channel "planningP3" ready for you to use. In this channel this weekend, discuss how you're planning to approach this paper and its workload. If you have a favorite strategy (roman-numeral outlining; drawing a diagram; index cards red yarn, and a corkboard; et cetera) share this with your peers. Many of them have not done a paper of this scale before, and may have no idea where to even start. (If you're one of those, definitely jump into the discussion, even if only to say "usually I wing it HALP PLZ!")

Also don't forget the attendance quiz for today.

You can find the instruction sheet for P3 on Canvas, on Slack, and below. It's mostly the same as what was discussed here, but has some other details: