Title: Project proposal

Title: Project proposal

Due:Friday March 20

Length: 800 words (+/- 10%)

Weight: 20% of the total grade

Format: Times New Roman, double-spaced, 12pt.

Description: For your first assessment, you need to propose a piece of academic writing that you will work on for the duration of the semester. Your proposal must include:

1.Field of interest(e.g. computer science, law, literature, accounting, philosophy, medicine, etc.)

For this opening section you only need to provide a name for the field that you hope your major piece of writing will belong to. This might be your own discipline, a discipline you'dliketo join, a discipline you are interested in, or maybe a field that you'd like to work in one day. Thefield of interestwill influence what you can write about, what citation style you use, what kinds of readers you might imagine for your writing, and much else besides. So pick something that you will actually ENJOY!

2.A question, claim, or statement you would like to explore(e.g. "The uncanny dystopia of the puzzle platformerINSIDE" for a paper in the field of Video Game studies, or "A brief history of mimes" for a historical article, or "Workpac v Rossato: An opinion" for a legal opinion, etc.)

Every piece of academic writing has an argument. An argument isnota disagreement or a set of opposing beliefs, but rather it is a central claim or belief that you are trying to think through. It's what makes your writing start somewhere and end somewhere. It might be motivated by a question ("Is Pluto really a planet?") or a statement ("Defund the police") or a piece of evidence ("Study finds bald men at higher risk of coronavirus") or a claim ("Human beings sang before they spoke"), or something else. Whatever your case might be, you need to have something thatyou want to find outand/or thatyou want your reader to know.

3.A citation from an equivalent article/report/paper/book within your field of interest

In a later assessment, you will be required to analyse a paper from your field of interest. For this proposal, you simply need to findone exampleof a piece of academic writing from your chosen field and then provide a full academic citation. Rather than ask you to write in MLA or APA, etc., we are asking for a citation in the style of your chosen field. For example, if you're interested in early childhood education you'll probably find a paper that should be cited in APA format. Whatever citation style you choose, you MUST follow those conventions. If you're unsure, you can look at places like thePurdue Writing LabLinks to an external site.to get an idea of how to cite. To save yourself some time later on, I'd encourage you to find a GOOD example of a paper that you would like to emulate. Try and find a paper that might be useful for your final assessment, but be carefulnotto pick a paper that perfectly answers your question. Looking for relevant papers might show you whether your claim is likely to be supported by evidence.

4.A description of what you hope your final piece of academic writing will be

This is themain partof your proposal and should be written in first-person ("I hope to find" "My suspicion is that..." etc.) In this section of your proposal, you should explain to your reader (that's your tutor!):

i) whyyou chose your field of interest (what led you to pick this area? what do you like/dislike about academic writing in this field? how do you hope to improve, etc?)

ii)whyyou think your question/claim/statement is worth pursuing (why you think it is interesting or compelling or important, etc.)

iii)howyou think you might organise and present your argument (how much evidence will you need? do you think you will discuss opposing points of view? do you have an idea of what your major claims are likely to be? will you use a specific structure? etc.)

iv)whatyou think your kind of academic writing is for (what's the point of academic writing? what purpose does it serve? who is its audience? etc.)

v)whatyou hope to learn through writing your major piece (what do you want to know at the end of this task? do you want to understand yourself better? do you want to improve as a writer? do you want to get to the bottom of a hunch? etc.)

Your total word-count should not exceed 800 words (+/- 10%). You should use the numbered sections above as the structure for your written response. Section 4 will be the longest part of your response, but instead of include those subsections (i.e. i-v) you should instead try to answer each of those prompts within a few paragraphs. Your final response will look something like this: