As you already know, the research paper is going to be a biography of a famous person. However, this paper is not going to be a typical biographical essay that tends to give a chronological—and boring—description of the subject from his or her birth to his or her death. Instead, I’m going to ask you to focus on the one particular part of that person’s life that you consider to be a turning point. For example, if the subject of your paper were Barack Obama, you would probably focus on his election as President. If the subject of your paper were Harriet Tubman, you might want to discuss her first successful navigation of the Underground Railroad. But a person’s turning point may not be the most obvious choice. In your research you may find that the most important instance of a person’s life occurred in his or her childhood, and not at the point where he or she achieved the apex of fame and accomplishment. And for certain celebrities, their deaths might be considered the most important turning point. Consider Abraham Lincoln, for example. Certainly, his tragic and unexpected murder could certainly be considered a turning point in our national history.
Now just because I want you to primarily focus on your subject’s turning point, does not mean that you have to ignore the basic facts of the person’s life, such as where and when he or she was born, lived, died, etc.; you will, of course, need to write about those details. Still, I want the paper to be mostly focused on the turning point—and I want you to tell it like a story. The rough draft of this paper will be due October 28th, the final draft will be due November 18th.
- First, I want to see your papers accurately formatted using MLA guidelines. This means that I want to see the margins at one inch; I want to see a header with your last name and page number on the top right; a heading that contains your name, then my name, the class, and then the date. Your paper should have a title that is centered, and everything should be double spaced. I am providing you a link to assemble MLA paper that you can look at. The simple instruction always give students is that when your paper is finished, look at your paper, then look at the sample paper; if there are any visible differences between your paper and the sample, then your paper is incorrect and you must change it so that looks like the MLA sample.
- Next, I also want to see a perfectly formatted works cited page. The works cited page is perhaps the most hated aspect of writing a research paper, so it’s good to get it over with for the rough draft. But as I mentioned in my weekly introduction, we are living in a time where the creation of work cited pages is far easier then when I was an undergraduate. There are a host of websites where all you have to do is input the information for your sources and they will create a perfect citation for you. Below I will provide a link that lists a number of these resources. And I will also provide you a site concisely describes the ins and outs of MLA formatting and citation.
- Finally, and this is related to the works cited page, I want to see you attempt to include in-text citations in your paper. These are also known as parenthetical citations because they’re contained in parentheses at the end of each quoted for paraphrased sentence. Generally, the parentheses at the end of the sentence contains the author’s last name and page number. Of course, it’s not always that simple; sometimes the article you are citing doesn’t have an author or page number, so you might be confused as to what goes in the parentheses in those cases. So the last helpful link I’m providing below explains all of the different ways that and in-text citation may appear.
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