Topic: Will eating disorders increase within the next few years in the United States? If so what can we do to decrease the probability?
Your major writing assignment, the exciting opportunity, is to complete an inquiry-driven thesis-offering research project—a project for which you conduct research to explore a question and substantiate, offer, or test a thesis or hypothesis.
Typically, such a project reviews, synthesizes, responds to, and draws upon what others have said about the question, thesis, or hypothesis of interest and offers a research-informed perspective, opinion, thesis, or hypothesis for the audience’s consideration.
For the purposes of this course, it’s essential that the question be one about which there’s an appropriate degree of uncertainty or diversity of opinion — not a question whose answer we can look up in some authoritative text, and not a question whose answer is something obvious or cliché.
As long as your question meets that constraint, the question can be psychological, ethical, social, political, philosophical, rhetorical, etc. Your research project can complement and develop work you’ve already done. Your research question can be related to the work you did in your essay of belief. Or your research project can be an opportunity to explore a question that genuinely interests you and that you haven’t explored yet in this course.
Also essential is that the project make use of academic research methods, academic databases, and an academic style of source documentation (like MLA style). For this reason, I’m requiring that the final essay have at least five references, including at least three scholarly works (scholarly journal articles or scholarly book chapters) accessed through online academic databases available to you through the college library. I’ll explain how to find and cite scholarly sources in future workshops.
