ENGL 622: Medieval Women Writers, Fall 2011
Seminar Paper
The usual "tangible product" of a graduate seminar is a formal scholarly essay that would be suitable for reading at a scholarly conference or for publication in an appropriate journal. This assignment counts as 25% of your grade. A scholarly manuscript is usually around 20 pages (4000-5000 words) exclusive of documentation; aim for the 15-20 page range for your paper and you should be okay. (Incidentally, about 20 pp is the length requirement for writing samples requested by most Ph.D. programs; this is good practice for developing those materials.) I strongly suggest that you read the chapter on Seminar Papers from Gregory Semenza's book on Graduate Study for the 21st Century as a way of looking for approaches and organizing your work (and it's also a method that scales up very well to writing a thesis, in case you are interested!).
Your paper must
· have a critical (i.e. argumentative) slant--it can't just be an info dump on "everything I found about Margaret Porete,"
· have a clear theoretical stance,
· involve close analysis of the text(s) you work with--yes, you actually have to quote and paraphrase the original work!!!!
· show familiarity with the scholarly issues and discussion already published on the subject you have chosen (which will involve using the MLA bibliography, interlibrary loan, and PASCAL), and
· be correctly documented according to the standards of 2009 MLA format (unless the journal you would intend to submit to has a different format).
This assignment has multiple components:
you must submit a descriptive abstract to me by Tuesday October 25 at noon;
turn in an annotated bibliography (at least eight items) by Friday November 11 at 5 PM;
meet with me the week before Thanksgiving to review a substantively complete rough draft of the paper;
submit a revised 150 word version of your abstract on Monday Nov. 28 by noon so that I can prepare for our "mini-conference" on Tuesday;
deliver an abbreviated version as a "conference paper" on Tuesday Nov. 29 as the culminating event of the class (in lieu of the final exam). Your grade will be based on the combination of the revised abstract, the paper delivery, and your participation in providing feedback to other class members;
and turn in the final paper, including a revised abstract, on or before Tuesday Dec. 6 at 5 pm.
All the preliminary work, as well as the abstract and the quality (and timeliness) of your rough draft will figure into the final grade for the paper. So will the quality of your research; many good articles will be in journals to which our databases don't subscribe, and you'll have to use ILL and PASCAL to get those resources for your paper. JSTOR is not enough and papers that clearly only have used JSTOR as the sourcing will be penalized appropriately when they are graded.
When you turn in the final essay, you will be asked to identify a specific, appropriate journal or conference for your essay, though you need not actually submit it. You will also be asked to turn in an informative abstract for the finished paper that you could submit to a conference or journal. The Penn "Call for Papers" website is a great place to start looking for these venues.
As graduate students, I should not have to remind you that it is mandatory you avoid plagiarism, but I’ll do that anyway; consult the Guide to Using Borrowed Material on the English Department web page or ask me if you have any questions about whether you’re using source material appropriately. For tips on writing both kinds of abstract, click here. For samples of several kinds of abstracts, click here. For my Literary Analysis rubric, click here.