MULTI-GENRE RESEARCH PAPER

            Friday's class is devoted to the project proposals.  Your task is to read each project proposal and make thoughtful, helpful comments.  Ask questions if you need further explanation.  Make suggestions for sources and share any connections you have.

           This project provides a chance to pursue a passion in your intellectual/emotional/spiritual life, a chance to strive to answer a question involving a topic of consuming interest to you and to communicate your learning through a multi-genre research project, where you get at the factual, the emotional, and the imaginative.  

            
            Choose a person, idea, topic, trend, era, cultural phenomenon, movement, thing, place . . . and become the quintessential mad researcher!

Required Research Sources Of Your Inquiry:

·        At least one book (or two, or three. Read fast, become an expert)

·        Articles

·        Primary material:  interviews, testimony, observations

·        Internet sources*

*The Internet contains both the good and the bad. Evaluate the quality and the depth of what you find.  Utilize the databases Parkview and MSU offer.    This is a chance to challenge yourself, to stretch and refine your writing skills and powers of communication.

Genres or pieces your multi-genre project must contain:

·        Brief informational research essay, four to five pages.  Make this vivid, informational, straight-ahead writing.  Boil your topic down to essentials.   

·        Preface/Introduction/Dear Reader

·        A visual element/the arts

·        Works Cited

·        Note Page

·        Unifying elements 

            Include in your paper all six bulleted items, but you’ll need to write more genres than these to create a fully realized mgp.  Wherever else you go in the writing is up to you. Range as widely as you want in creating this paper. 

            Begin your research soon, make it part of your academic life, take notes and gather bibliographic information.