Research paper

This research paper, like any self-respecting academic research paper, blends information from two main sources: your own opinion, and existing scholarship written by others. Your opinion, here, means the argument you wish to make about our primary source, the play Antigone by Sophocles. Note that this means other kinds of writing, like summary of the plot, is not sufficient for what we are trying to do here. Your readers must know what you think; your research paper should have a unique personal stamp and not closely resemble that of any classmate. The main text of your research paper will attempt to persuade audiences that your point of view is reasonable. But we are not, in all likelihood, experts in literature, or ancient Greek drama. Therefore, we show our reasonableness by quotation: quoting the text of Antigone itself, to show that it really says what we claim it says, and quoting secondary sources, written by other scholars who publish in reliable places, to show that other people share our opinions, or that we are aware of them and have engaged with them seriously. Your class will introduce you to some secondary critical material of this kind and discuss with you some ways to evaluate sources for reliability. You will be asked to assemble a set of at least four secondary sources, including at least one that you find on your own through the Temple College Library. Topic Selection: You may write about any topic that interests you about the play Antigone. This could be a particular character, passage, issue, or situation in the text; you may also compare this play to some other literary text, as long as you spend the majority of your time discussing Antigone. Please let your instructor know if you have questions about any topic idea that comes to you, and let your interests guide you! Stipulations: The word count for this assignment must be at least 1100, excluding works cited page. The total number of sources must be at least five (5); that is, the primary text, Antigone, plus a minimum of four (4) secondary sources. Your essay should be double-spaced and in a standard, 12-point serif font (such as Garamond, Times New Roman, Century Schoolbook, Baskerville, etc.) Regular and substantial quotation and citation from all sources is mandatory, and key to the success of a research paper. Your quotations must be accurate and sufficient to give a sense for each authors meaning and style. They must be enclosed in quotation marks and followed by parenthetical citations giving an authors name and page number(s) on which that exact quotation may be found. If you paraphrase or summarize information from a text and do not quote, you are still required to offer a parenthetical citation leading to an exact page on which the information can be found. However, doing this alone is not sufficient; you must use quotation and paraphrase/summary together, not just one or or the other. Your submission must conclude with a works cited page that lists all of the sources, sorted alphabetically by authors last name. Block quotes: if your quote runs over four lines of text, you should reformat it to a block quote. These are indented one inch, do not include punctuation marks, and are followed by a parenthetical citation after the period. No guarantee can be made that there will be time for rewrites after the final submission is made. Therefore, you should submit your best work to this dropbox. Do not try your luck with a dishonestly produced product! Documentation of Research: In addition to the works cited page that forms the conclusion to your research paper, you must separately document all sources used in PDF format in the source dropbox. This means actually uploading those PDF documents, and highlighting the quotations you have used. (If your class uses a physical textbook, you do not need to upload those sources to the dropbox).