Final Essays: Guidelines and Due-Date

Your final essays are due by May 11th at 3:30PM. Since I will be traveling, you should submit these to me by email. If you do not receive a response confirming receipt of the essay within 24 hours, please try to get in touch by other means to make sure it came through.

These essays should be somewhat more significant than your first (2,000–3,000 words for undergraduates, 3,000–5,000 words for graduates) and should involve (in a non-trivial way) at least five peer-reviewed sources (including at least three that were not assigned in class).

I'll be using the same rubric as I used to mark the first essays. If you have any questions about what you need to do to get into the right-most column, please don't hesitate to ask. Following my writing advice (and attending to the associated links) will help. Make sure you've got a clearly articulated, specific, focused thesis to argue for. Make sure that you're actually arguing for it, rather than just repeating the claim in slightly different words (keep asking yourself, "How might Slater — or some other moderately intelligent and skeptical reader — object here? How would I respond to those objections?"). And of course you should follow the formatting guide as an easy source of points: you may have your own nifty personal convention, but I'd rather see you consistently put into play a commonly-employed style of citing work, formatting essays, &c.

As usual, I'll be happy to look at drafts, but my ability to do so declines as the deadline gets closer and more people ask me to.