HON 101          Talk to Me       

Final Paper:       due December 19, 2005 3:01p.m.

Write a 4-5 page research paper on language style as related to racial, ethnic, cultural or gender groups and personal identity. This research paper must rely heavily on references from primary sources (e.g. academic and scholarly words rather than the newspapers or less formal web sources). Possible areas that would fit this criterion are Linguistic Profiling, the Ebonics controversy, the evolution of Pygmalion/Cinderella myths or forensic linguistics. You can start with the resources the class found during 11/28 class or the reserved reading. You may also incorporate references, including movies, from our integrative seminar. However, I strongly recommend that you come up with a fairly tight topic, go looking for references, get a few papers/ articles and write a claim/thesis (e.g. “Forensic linguistics is useful in determining perpetrators of a crime but can also over-generalize who the guilty party might be.”  --- I have no idea if this is true; I just made it up as an example).

Timeline Requirements:

* Email me your tentative thesis statement (the claim you’re going to make) and a list of references by Friday, December 9.

* Pass in your paper either under my door or in the box in S210 by 12/19/05 at 3:01 p.m. I will be collecting the papers then and going home, so please don’t push the papers under my door after that time. If you want to finish early, that’s fine, but please put your papers in the box in the office rather than under my door (the cleaning people sometimes throw away papers on the floor).

Hints:

I’ll be grading based on the four dimensions I used last time: originality, reach, informative and clarity. Let me describe what I look for more explicitly:

originality: Does the author (i.e. you) make a new analysis and/or a new claim? The words “In my opinion” can be useful here, but aren’t necessary. For example, if you analyze the data for vowel lengths and give a good, reasoned claim for the data you see, you’re being original.

reach: Does the author push herself to try something new? Does she choose a hard paper to review? Did she take a topic suggestion and add more? How successful is she?

informative: Does the author bring in information from sources other than those mentioned in class? Is this information clearly described? Did I learn something from the paper? Can I find the references?  

clarity: Is the paper clear? Is it easy to follow? For this, use what you now know about syntax and semantics: pronouns have to be easy to decode, the subject and the verbs have to match, etc. Look at every sentence to see if it contributes to what you’re trying to say.

By the way, it’s very common to be thinking as you type and end up in an unexpected place. That’s cool; that’s education. But it probably means that the beginning of the paper no longer matches the end. Check to see if your central theme is consistent throughout the paper. (e.g. theme: “I think the paper by Veilleux is a sham.” You can’t also say that the paper is good without saying that you can see both the good and bad points in it.) You can change your mind as you write. But you will have to re-write the paper with your new, consistent opinion.   

One other thing to avoid: COIK, (Clear Only If Known). Read your paper out loud and think about whether a smart friend who’s not in our class would understand it. Sometimes that means writing things that you know that I know. Go ahead.