Research Posts (2 installments + review in final exam)

1st Research Post due 22-29 March

2nd Research Post  due 19-26 April

Assignment: Research and write two “adventures / experiments in research.”

• These exercises must be relevant to our subject matter but also reflect your personal and professional interests.
   

• Content & Organization: Posts are reports, not essays. They should be interesting and readable, but they are not analyses of literary texts. Rather, they report and explain your findings in a subject area of interest.
   

• Relate your research to Literature, but content options include history, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, women's studies, multicultural studies, etc.
   

• Your topic may grow from a course text or author, a term or theory mentioned in the course objectives, or another student's presentation, or relevant material from other courses, personal reading, or experience.
   

• Your second post may continue the same content as your first posting, so that your two posts relate to, build on, or vary each other--or they may be distinct subjects.
   

• The only absolute stipulation for content is that the subject must have something to do with Early American Literature.
   

• Your final exam will assess these research experiments as part of your overall learning experience.
   

• Most typical mistake: Students want to write a personal analysis of texts we're studying or might study because that's the kind of writing they're familiar with in a Literature course.

• That approach is an essay, not a report.

• Some primary research may be involved, but the report requires secondary and background research.

• In brief, Research Posts emphasize gathering and explaining knowledge, rather than reading and interpreting poems and fiction.
   

Length: 4-7 paragraphs, plus or minus bibliographic information

Bibliographic requirements and information: At least 4 sources, at least some of which should be from reputable scholarship and not just stray internet postings. MLA style is expected. Information may be included in text or more completely in listings at end of posting.

Bibliographic information may be included in paragraphs or more completely in listings at end of posting.

Posting to webpage: Email contents to instructor at whitec@uhcl.edu. Instructor will post to webpage and email notification of posting with a brief reaction. This may be all the feedback the student will receive until final grade report. (See “grading” below.)

Organization, Content, etc.:

Provide a title for your entry that will serve as a web heading or link. This title should indicate the content. The title may take the form of a question.

1^st paragraph: Introduce and frame a question you want to answer or a topic you want to know more about.

• Explain the source or background of your interest; what you already knew on the subject, how or where you learned it or were alerted to it, etc.
• These backgrounds can be personal as well as educational or professional.
• At some point in this introductory paragraph, a statement of the question you’re trying to answer should appear.

2^nd and 3^rd paragraphs: Describe your search for answers to your question or topic.

• Identify, locate, describe, and evaluate at least two sources.
• Your sources may be print, Web, or personal (interview, lecture, conversation, or anecdote).
• If Web, provide links.
• If print, provide bibliographic information. (MLA style is preferred, but the main point of all documentation is to enable your reader to find the source.)
• If “personal,” provide as much contextual information as possible; welcome to protect privacy.

4^th paragraph: What is the answer to your question?

• Your “answer” may take a variety of forms, as long as you demonstrate learning.
• You may find a definite answer to your specific question.
• Or you may learn that you’ve asked the wrong question, in which case you could conclude by revising your question.
• Summarize and evaluate what you have learned.
• Consider what your next step might be if you continued your research along this line.

These paragraph descriptions are only guidelines, not absolute rules.

You may write more than 4 paragraphs, but more than 6 or 7 paragraphs may push the assignment too far.

Grading schedule: Grades for research postings are not returned until the Final Grade Report

Instead of a grade and extended review for your first post, on receipt of your submission I will send a brief email . summarizing my overall impression of your submission + suggestions for next moves.

Your two research posts together receive a single grade, which appears in your Final Grade Report because your final exam will reference one or both of your Research Posts.

This description may sound tricky, and some students like their grade outcomes better than others, but in several semesters of such assignments I've had no direct complaints--only questions, which you're welcome to ask.

Grading standards: Research Post grades are based on readability, interest, quality of research, and learning.

• Readability: quality of reading and writing distinguishes excellence and competence in Literature courses--not just covering course materials but organizing extended analyses into compelling essays. Competence in spelling, punctuation, grammar, and clarity are taken for granted. Given time pressures, occasional careless errors won't break your grade, but chronic errors must be factored. Thematic unity, continuity, and transitions are essential.
   
• Interest: Not whether I would have chosen the topic, but how well the report generates and sustains interest. A personal angle is welcome for starters, but develop for wider appeal.
   
• Quality of research: Use what you've learned about academic research. Consult with Neumann Library's reference librarians. But also take some chances--interview, review a relevant film, magazine, or commercial site. Scholars in Literature and Humanities combine work and pleasure--honoring what they must do but redeeming what they want to do.
   
• Learning: The most consistently redeeming quality in all research is the sense that the author (and at least potentially the audience) has learned something valuable. Emphasize what you wanted to know and why + how your research advanced or changed your knowledge and understanding.

Additional examples from other courses:

Research Posts 2008 (American Immigrant Literature)

Research Posts 2006 (American Immigrant Literature)

Research Posts 2009 (Colonial-Postcolonial Literature)

Possible topics

An author associated with Early American Literature

A defining historical event or movement relevant to early American literature or cultural development

Other artistic, literary, or cultural movements associated with early America

Secondary critical research concerning a work, author, or issue related to our subject. (You would find several critical articles or books relevant to your interest, then summarize what you gained or learned from reviewing them.)

Past student work for the course, or theses concerning colonial or postcolonial texts:
 

Forbidden topic

Edgar Allan Poe--a favorite, but he's really after this course, so please accept his appearance in the readings as gift enough.
 

Topic (Salem witch trials) that must contain proviso:

Every semester several students want to research the Salem Witch Trials. No problem except that, no matter how many times I reinforce that there was no witchcraft, only moral hysteria, some students continue to act as though witchcraft and satanism were really a fact among the innocent people murdered by the courts of Salem.

Therefore, if you write a research post on the witch trials of Salem, or if you write extensively about this subject in an exam, you must either preface such materials with the following qualifying statement (to appear before the text of your report or essay), or else include similar qualifying statements in your own text:

The reason the Salem Witch Trials are interesting to later Americans is not because there were evil witches at Salem but because there weren't, yet for a number of reasons--social change, insecurity, childish pranks, "moral hysteria"--normal people came to believe that witches were causing the community's problems, resulting in the execution of 19 innocent citizens and the imprisonment, corruption, and misery of many others despite the absence of any evidence that should be legally admissible in a modern court. If anyone was evil or wrong, it was the people who accused other people of being witches, or people who panicked and cooperated with such persecutions. In these regards, the occurrences at Salem in 1769 more closely resemble the Daycare Satanic Ritual Child Abuse Scandals of the 1980s and other moral hysterias that recur here and there throughout human history.