Context: A term paper is a research paper written by students over an academic term, accounting for a large part of a grade. The online version of Merriam-Webster defines a term paper as "a major writing assignment in a school or college course representative of a student’s achievement during a term." Term papers are generally intended to describe an event, a concept, or argue a point. The term paper is a written original work discussing a topic in detail, usually several typed pages in length, and is often due at the end of a semester. For Essay 4, you will be engaging in this time-honored tradition by submitting a rather lengthy essay representative of the work you have been doing all semester. In our case, the term paper will represent the knowledge you have gained over the course of the semester through research, analysis, discussion, and writing about culture.
Assignment: You have been preparing to write Essay 4 all semester. The structures of Essays 1 through 3 will make up Essay 4. In other words, you will, basically, be using the structures of Essays 1 through 3, but you will focus on just one culture or cultural phenomenon of your choosing. You may choose a culture with which you identify as a member or as an outsider. You will benefit from thinking of your research paper as being comprised of three parts which largely parallel Essays 1-3 in structure.
Part 1 (Reflective of Essay 1)
Option 1: Write about an event or memory that defines your place in a particular culture. You may want to reflect on your childhood experiences—your family, your likes and dislikes, particular events that shape who you are, role models, etc. Then consider the ways those early experiences might account for the type of culture you feel a part of today or once felt a part of. The key here is not so much to tell a story, but rather to illuminate a culture and its impact on you (and on other members of the culture) through the lens of that event. "Valley of the Gun" as well other assigned readings may serve as examples of ethnographic narrative. No matter what option you choose to explore for this part of the essay, you will benefit from using the techniques from readings on narrative and description.
Option 2: Think about a culture you participate in and identify with. Your goal will be to describe that culture to outsiders by focusing on a few elements of it in detail. Use vivid description to convey these elements and reflect on the cultural values they represent
Option 3: Conduct an interview with another member of the particular culture you describe. Put your interviewee’s point of view in dialogue, or perhaps in tension, with your own. You will not simply be reporting an interview. Rather you will want to integrate parts of the other person’s perspective into your essay.
Part 2 (Reflective of Essay 2)
Choose one or two cultural artifacts from the culture that you are exploring and analyze the values that the artifact or artifacts convey. What hopes, preferences, or ideas do these artifacts communicate? What do these values (and thus these artifacts) reveal about your community? About society as a whole? Next, critically consider whether or not mainstream American cultures agrees with the values conveyed by your artifact or artifacts, and why. Explore where these considerations place your chosen culture in relationship to mainstream American culture. Like essay 2, this section of your essay will benefit from the use of process analysis and division and classification.
Part 3
This part of the assignment asks that you identify some striking feature of the culture you are exploring, then compare and contrast both insider and outsider perspectives, discussions, and explanations of that phenomenon so that you can better explain the causes and effects of that practice.
Academic discourse often favors the outside expert’s point of view. For example, if you were to explore female genital mutilation, you would likely hear many voices from outsiders, most of whom would likely be, understandably, critical of the practice. However, in this assignment, an essay that only explored this outsider position would be incomplete. You must go further and find insider voices, people for whom the practice is natural and normal, or at least those who have experienced it firsthand. Like Essay three, this section will benefit from the use of cause-and-effect as well as compare-and-contrast.
Your term paper should have a clear thesis which is explored and evinced in your analysis. In other words, the various sections of the term paper should be organized by an overarching thesis. What, after having read your term paper, do you want your reader to understand about your culture? This thesis should be stated in the introductory paragraph and should adhere to the conventions regarding thesis statements. The various sections of your essay should serve to develop and establish your thesis.
Points: 200
Length and Formatting: 12 pages (not including works cited page). Follow MLA conventions for academic writing: In general, 1-inch margins all around, 12-point MLA-approved font (Times New Roman if uncertain), double-spaced, page number and last name in upper right-hand header (.5” from the top).
Sources: You will need at least 8 sources for this final installment of your essay, one of which must be Clash!. Some of the research you have conducted for essays one through three may be relevant to your term paper. If so, please use it for Essay 4.
Organization: The organization of this essay should be the order in which you wrote the previous essays. As this is a much longer essay, transitions between paragraphs and ideas become much more important. In a shorter essay, transitions are less important. Most people can follow along for five paragraphs, but as this essay is much longer, your kind guidance of the reader through the use of transitions and effective use of paragraphs becomes more necessary.
In addition to the use of transitions, you will also be asked to use section headers, a topic you can explore in more detail in Methods and Modes of Academic Writing
You might think of this essay as having three distinct parts. These three parts should be comprised of the rhetorical modes we have explored this semester:
- Essay 1:
- Narration
- Description
- Exemplification
- Essay 2:
- Process analysis
- Division and classification
- Essay 3:
- Comparison and contrast
- Cause and effect
- In addition to the above sections, your term paper should also contain the devices introduced during term paper assignment:
- Classification
- Argument and persuasion
Style Points: Throughout the semester, we have studied a number of sentence-level devises for improving the clarity and readability of your writing. For your final essay, I ask that you include at least one example of each of the following:
- Super-literalism
- Parallelism
- Exemplum
- Distinctio
- Proacatlepsis
- Metabasis
- Simile
- Very Short Sentence
- Freighting Sentence
- Hypophora
- Parenthesis
- Cumulative Sentence
- Periodic Sentence
- Paratactic Sentence
- Hypotactic Sentence
- Appositive
- Anadiplosis
Purpose: This is a term paper (sometimes referred to as a research paper). The purpose of this assignment is to teach you the process for writing longer essays, a requirement of the upper-division work waiting for you at the institutions to which you will likely transfer. But more importantly, this assignment is intended to teach you how to develop a respectable level of knowledge in a relatively short period of time and how to communicate the depth and complexity of your knowledge in writing.
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