Proposal and Outline

The full text of the article that I chose can be found @ http://www.meaning.ca/archives/archive/art_how_to_write_P_Wong.htm

This article kicks off by explaining to readers that the quality of any research is limited by the quality of the preceding proposal.  A bad proposal dooms what could have been a great research topic from the start.  A good proposal should tell an audience what it is that you want to find out, what you intend to do to discover it and how you carry out your plans.  The author places emphasis not only on the quality of the ideas in the proposal, but the quality in which they are delivered via effective writing.  A good idea can get shot down due to poor presentation, when a few rewrites might have saved it.  This proposal should show that the student has a solid mastery of the material reviewed as well as their own ideas and is ready to proceed.

The proposal should have all of the following sections in order:

Title: something concise and descriptive

Abstract: a brief overview of  the paper from research question to a b risk walk-through of methods.

Introduction: this section provides context and background for your research, as well as stating your hypothesis and variables.

Literature review: often included in the introduction.  Provides a research framework for your current project, convinces readers that your research is an important and productive direction to take the genre of research in.

Methods section: Tells readers about your methodology, or how you are going to go about conducting your research.  Includes information on what you will be measuring for, what your participants will be, and other information on what conducting your study will consist of.  A good methods section should allow another researcher to replicate your experiment exactly as you did without looking any further in to how you did your research.

Results:  What you found out from your data.  Proposals don’t have any data yet, but the author suggests explaining what types of procedures you will use to make sense of your data once you collect it.

Discussion:a section where you convince your readers of the importance of what you just spent so much time and energy doing in your research.  this is also where the limitations of your research are discussed (while paying careful attention to not undermining what you just did).

Each section is examined in detail in the article, and the author points out some common mistakes that students make such as depending too heavily on secondary sources.

Article #2- Research outline

The full text of this article can be found @

http://www.tailoredessays.com/how-write/research-paper/outline.htm

The author of this article focuses on beginning a research paper outline as a structure of research and facts that can be used to support your thesis.  It should be written as a deductive process, and at the end you should re-analyze your gathered information and restructure your thesis for a better fit.  At the end of constructing your logical progression of facts, you should go back through and make sure that all items in the outline are in sync both logically and gramatically.  it is also important to make sure that the items in the outline structure do not overlap, and to check for discrepancies before moving on to the next part of your writing process.