Research Essay- Arguing for Change
Objectives:
Better understand the issues and sources important to your field
Survey research in order to narrow and develop a topic
Propose a research project using a pre-defined format
Choose and review credible and scholarly secondary sources
Use research to support an intellectual argument
Write an academic argument proposing change in your field to an audience of your peers
Present your argument to a general audience and defend it
Purpose: To inform and persuade
Format: Essay, eight to ten complete pages
Audience: Undergraduate students in your major
Research Essay: Arguing for Change
This assignment asks you to propose a change that will solve a problem in your field (Finance). You will explore your professional field or academic discipline; develop practical research, writing and presentation skills; and write an essay that is no fewer than 8 complete pages and no more than 10 that briefly identifies a problem and then uses research to support your proposal for change. Your proposed change should be of your own invention.
What does "change" mean for your field?
Some of you may be interested in proposing a practical, non-scholarly change, such as providing more funding for research and development or increasing cultural-competence training for your colleagues. For these arguments, showing the need and arguing for a visible change may be the easy part; using scholarly sources and a scholarly format may be more challenging.
Some of you may be more interested in "pure" research that is directed at colleagues in your field. For these arguments, using scholarly sources and presenting an academic argument should be fairly straightforward. But you'll need to make sure that you don't merely repeat an argument that's already been made or recap your sources.
Regardless of which approach you take, you can use research to effectively argue for change. The components of this project, combined with class activities and exercises, will help you do so.
Project Components
Although the pieces of this research project are outlined individually (each with its own assignment description, requirements, and due date), you should not think of them as discrete activities. Remember that the research and writing process is recursive, which means that you move forward from one phase (such as preliminary research) to the next and then find that you need to return to an "earlier" portion of the project. Thus, the phases of this project overlap and affect one another. For example, although your literature review is due after your project proposal, you'll certainly be working on them in tandem; you'll need to do some research to propose your essay topic, which will start building your annotated bibliography, and then more research to refine and develop your ideas-likely as you're beginning to draft your essay. You'll need to be thinking about (and, often, looking ahead to) each stage of this project as you work on the following individual pieces.