For Lia

Essay Three

The Research Paper

Choose any writer whose work is represented in your textbook and look for biographical and historical information that will help you to understand his or her work. You can choose anybody--a poet, a short story writer, or a playwright.

It's not necessarily an advantage to choose somebody about whom whole libraries have been written. If you choose William Shakespeare, for example, you will have to narrow your subject down a lot more than if you choose someone like Susan Glaspell. On the other hand, there may not be enough biographical material on someone who started publishing very recently.

You should look for a mixture of books, journal articles, and internet souces. Don't forget to check the catalogues of other libraries for books, and to go through Infotrak and J-Stor for journal articles.

You should have a MINIMUM of five pages, double spaced, not including the Works Cited page.

Be careful about how you make connections between the writer's life and work. Remember that writers are not the same as the characters in their works. Write about influences, not direct cause and effect.

You should have a clear thesis, as always, and provide lots of specific support.

Review the MLA form section of your handbook to make sure you understand how to credit sources and create a Works Cited page. Remember that any time you use direct quotations, ideas, or other information from someone else's work, you MUST credit the source, even if you are paraphrasing. For example, if you write that Robert Frost taught at Amherst College, you need to give a source for that fact in a parentheses at the end of the sentence.