Rewriting Question

Assignment topic: Rough Draft

Instructions

Your rough draft should be a close-to-complete version of your final paper. The more you have done for your rough draft, the better your feedback will be for the final product. Keep this in mind when you work on and submit this assignment.

This assignment should be at least six- to eight-pages in length. Note: As with the final draft, this does not include the cover page, abstract, or references.

For the rough draft, you should include:

an early version of your introduction

a literature review (you may want to check this Literature Review Reminder)

a conclusion

a bibliography

Optionally, you can include an abstract, but we will focus on that for the final paper.

As with the final paper, the introduction should set up a history/background of the topic, which can include a discussion of the impact of the topic (who/what does it affect) and a broad discussion of social science methods. You should also introduce the three major themes that you will be discussing in the literature review. For your conclusion, recap your overall discussion and the major points of the literature review. What does this tell us about your topic overall? How does the information fit together to portray the state of American culture? Reestablish the impact of the topic. Also cover any future directions that research should move in. Are there unanswered questions? Unstudied populations?

Avoid using first person. Do not say, “I want to discuss,” or similar things. Focus on the topic and the themes, not you or your experiences. 

As an example, instead of saying, “I want to explore how gender, race, and sexuality influence inequality,” you could say something like, “Inequality is influenced by a wide range of factors, including gender, race, and sexuality.”

• This would be a thesis statement to set up the rest of the paper from your introduction
• You should have at least eight to ten academic sources in your rough draft, though you can have more than ten.

What kind of sources can be used where: 

• Introduction: 
• Course readings

Lecture

Non-peer-reviewed materials  

Peer reviewed articles

Literature Review

Peer-reviewed, academic articles (here are some tips for double checking: https://www.lib.uci.edu/find-article)

It is best if these are published since 2010, but you can use articles published since 2005.

Lecture (I base lectured on peer-reviewed materials, so if you want to cite the lecture, that’s okay)

Conclusion 

Course readings

Lecture

• Non-peer-reviewed materials  

Peer reviewed articles

• Professor’s Feedback: Unclear thesis. Unclear themes (-1). Little in-text citations. Many of your paragraphs are too short (less than 3 sentences) to make a coherent argument. Your essay is also hard to follow since you don’t have clearly defined themes, which is a bit concerning at this stage in the quarter. Remember, you are expected to write a literature review of scholarly sources, rather than a historical overview of what happened. Also HIGHLIGHT THE THESIS STATEMENT