Research Essay checklist
Please remember to:
- Include, in whatever balance is appropriate, three components: your ideas about the painting, your ideas about the poem, and your research
- Include quotations from both the poem and your sources—and any time you include a quotation, make sure it’s not its own sentence but is part of a sentence, even if all that exists outside the quotation is According to SoAndSo, “Blah blah blah blah blah” (123).
- Check the organization of your essay—write an outline of the draft you’re working on to see if you like the order of ideas
- Make sure you have a thesis statement, and make sure it fits the essay you’re writing
- Avoid over-generalizing, especially in your introduction—remember that you want to argue something specific, not some universal truth that would be impossible to discuss well in 4-5 pages
- Think back to the initial questions you came up with for the project—do you answer them, something like them, different questions altogether, or is your essay merely a report of research collected?
- Write an essay that interests you, that you’re proud of, and that upholds college regulations on academic integrity
- Use a parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence any time you refer to someone else’s words or ideas
- Include a bibliographic entry in your Works Cited page for each source you quote from or refer to in your essay, and use easybib.com to help you format your citations—remember that the poem and painting should also be in your Works Cited page!
- Remove the annotations from your bibliographic entries that you wrote for the Annotated Bibliography
- Double-space your essay using the option in the paragraph menu, and indent the first line of each paragraph—and use a hanging indent on your Works Cited citations
- Proofread your essay, looking and listening for places where commas belong, for sentences that you might combine, for incorrect word, tense, or number choice, for sentence boundary errors, for illogical phrasing, and other errors
- Put titles of poems and paintings in quotation marks, books, magazines, journals, newspapers in italics
- Give your essay a title
- Upload your essay to our shared folder on Dropbox.com by the start of class on Wednesday.
Thank you—I look forward to reading your essays!
Leave a comment