After completing your annotated bibliography, your next step in your research writing process is to develop a proposal. This proposal will be peer reviewed in class, and will give you a chance to test out your ideas before completing the IRB application over Spring Break. Your proposal should include…
- Background Information
- What is your topic? Explain this a bit.
- What are some of the common things said about your topic in the research that you’ve read so far?
- Narrow Focus
- What problems or issues have you noticed in the research that you’ve read?
- What particular issues, problems, questions, or trends do you plan to address?
- Methods
- How are you going to examine your topic?
- What resources and methods do you expect to use?
- “So what?” Factor
- What is your purpose in tackling this research question?
- Why is your topic, and your approach to your topic, important?
Your proposal should be approximately 500-700 words. If you would also like to include some bullet points after the proposal consisting of ideas, keywords/phrases, questions, etc. in order to give your proposal more context and to help kickstart your thinking more directly, go for it! Remember that your research plan can change. The proposal is mostly to help you get an idea of the directions you should be heading in for your project, so don’t worry if your proposal looks very different from the project you hand in at the end of the semester.
Looking for a sample proposal? Take a look at this one. When I wrote this proposal for a conference presentation, I had not finished the paper, and had no idea of the exact argument I’d be making. I didn’t know until I wrote the actual paper for the conference. Here is a select collection of conference proposals, and here is another example of a proposal – this time from a student. (This example is not color coded.) And, if you want a more in-depth example and detailed explanation of proposed research methods, here is my dissertation prospectus. (Note that my dissertation ended up only doing part of what I proposed here.)
