This is the culmination of your work throughout the semester, shown in a Researched Position Paper that presents your academic and professional position focusing on a problem you want to explore in your field. It should reflect clear knowledge of the discourse community and academic audience, the current conversation on the topic in research, and the conventions and guidelines for documentation in your field. It is important to remember you are not writing down to uninformed people by informing them of simplistic concepts in your field. Instead, you are writing to the people in your field who have been teaching you or might be interviewing you. As such, defining simplistic terms and giving a history of your field are not good strategies for this assignment. This paper should be strongly argumentative instead of informative (70% argumentative, 30% informative). Furthermore, the paper should speak of your ability to choose, synthesize, and document sources correctly and in good rhetorical standing. You must incorporate a minimum of 12 academic articles but are encouraged to use other sources that do not meet the strict confines of being academic in addition to the required sources. This assignment also needs to reach a minimum of 5000 words to avoid deductions. It should include all items required by your documentation style (e.g. cover pages, abstracts, keywords, headings, headers, formatting, in-text citations, etc.). Also, it must be written in the expository mode. Worth 300 points. This assignment is not eligible for late submission. (Intellectual Skills: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; Broad and Integrative Knowledge: 4, 5)
You are required to use 12 academic articles in your Researched Position Paper. Each academic article you are short of the required 12 earns a deduction of 3%.
Remember that academic articles need to meet these parameters:
They must have a named author or authors. These need to be the names of people, not the name of an organization.
They must utilize and reference sources in some manner (e.g. parenthetical citations, footnotes, endnotes, etc.).
They must have been published in an academic journal.
Also, be mindful that you can use sources beyond the 12 academic articles and that those other sources can be something other than academic (e.g. professional, pop culture, etc.) as fits your career field and writing style. This is one of the ways to make sure you reach the required word count!
