Fact Paper

You can write about whatever you choose to meet the requirements. It can be made up about me or however you see fits best. Purpose

The Fact Paper asks that you write a descriptive essay presenting an unusual perspective about a person, object or event from your own life using only facts, which we define as empirically verifiable statements.

According to Purdue OWL guide to descriptive essays, The descriptive essay is a genre of essay that asks the student to describe somethingobject, person, place, experience, situation, etc. This genre encourages the students ability to create a written account of a particular experience.

However, the goal of the Fact Paper is to leave your reader with a clear impression of an unusual perspective on your subject using only fact statements, ensuring that your paper remains completely free of any evaluative language (positive or negative language that judges the worth of something). You must write WITHOUT emotions, feelings or opinions related to your topic.

What is an unusual perspective?

To choose a topic, begin to compile facts that allow you to show a subject from an unusual perspective. By unusual I mean different from how most people would think about a certain kind of person, or a certain kind of object or event. Your essay should NOT be a report. You are not writing an encyclopedia entry. You are presenting an artful, carefully crafted perspective. If you think this is impossible, consider that journalists do it all the time.

Though you are being artful and descriptive, you want in every case to use only empirically verifiable statements. At no point should you state your opinions or use evaluative language unless you are attributing it to someone else inside quotation marks. Your essay should only contain carefully collected and composed empirical statements that you have strategically organized.

Give some thought to how you compose each sentence. It is better to be detailed, rather than vague. It is good to have a combination of specific and general information. Consider how best to get your reader to see the topic from a certain angle. It is a matter of selection, arrangement and presentation.

IMPORTANT NOTE ON CHOOSING A TOPIC: As you consider possible topics for this paper, you should generally avoid emotionally charged and/or traumatic events because writing an entire paper using only fact statements, which cannot express feelings or emotions, will be difficult. In addition, unless something very unusual happened to you personally during the COVID-19 shelter in place, you should avoid attempting to provide an unusual perspective on what most people experienced during that time.

Formatting Your Rough Draft

Your Fact Paper – Rough Draft should be a minimum of 500 words in length, not including your citations and References page. The entire Fact Paper – Rough Draft should be formatted in APA style.

as a guide.

Aim to have five well-structured paragraphs in your essay. While the standard

is not the only way to organize your paper, it is a good place to start.Integrate and Cite at Least Three (3) Sources

Given that you’ll write a person, object or event from your own life, your essay will include details you know or can recall from memory. Those details count as facts so long as we could verify them had we been present at the event, or could see the person or object that you are describing. For example, you could say: My father was born the day after the 1970s World’s Fair opened in Osaka, Japan. His dad, my grandfather, was out of town for work and did not make it to the hospital in time for his birth.

Even though you will be writing about something or someone from your own life, you must still incorporate research. For instance, if you are describing someone who does a certain type of work, you could cite research on that occupation or you could quote from other people’s narratives about that job. If you are describing a person who is or was a paramedic, for example, you could quote Nicolas Cage’s character Frank in Bringing Out the Dead who says, “Saving someone’s life is like falling in love. The best drug in the world.”

By citing research and quoting other narratives, you can provide different perspectives on a subject, while refraining from evaluating and editorializing. Remember, a quote is a fact because all you are claiming is that someone else said it.

So where do you find sources you can use? King Library’s new

and

searches work just like Google, only they return more credible sources. Remember to log in with your SJSU credentials for full access.

Fact Paper – Rough Draft Instructions

1) Draft at least 500 of the total 1,000 words of the Fact Paper for peer review. Your draft should be coherent enough (including about five structured paragraphs) and polished enough that you do not waste your reviewer’s time. Your draft should also be developed enough that we have a sense of the unique perspective you wish to provide us on your topic.

2) Incorporate at least three of the six total sources with in-text citations formatted in APA style. Your sources and citations should be developed enough for your reviewer to be able to assess their effectiveness (). Your referenced source information must be phrased as empirically verifiable statements. You may find these easier to compose since quotes are a type of fact. Be sure that references are seamlessly embedded with your own writing so your reader understands what you are referencing and why. The Fact Paper assignment asks you to reference three different types of sources ():

1. Scholarly, peer-reviewed articles (ONE of this type of source for your rough draft, two of this type for the final draft)
2. People and documents that shape your thinking, such as news articles or popular media (ONE of this type of source for your rough draft, two of this type for the final draft)
3. Informal conversations and statements that you are relaying from your own life (ONE of this type of source for your rough draft, two of this type for the final draft)

3) Include a list your sources on a References page formatted in APA style. For your rough draft, your References page should have at least ONE scholarly, peer-reviewed article and ONE entry from people or documents that shape your thinking. NOTE: While you’ll have “personal communications” with in-text citations in the body of your essay, “personal communications” are not included on the References page in APA style.

*Attached is a sample fact paper