Position Papers

Article Review Due Friday, February 27
Source Analysis Due Friday, March 12
Rewrite of Source Analyses Due Monday, March 29
Annotated Bibliography & Exploratory Essay Due Monday, April 5
Oral Reports Given Tuesday, April 6 and Thursday, April 8
Position Paper Due for Peer Review Monday, April 19
Final Submission Due in class Tuesday, May 4

This assignment provides you the opportunity to engage other scholars investigating a problem or question in Roman history. You may select any topic related to the course that interests you. Your final product will be an essay explaining and defending a position on a specific problem or historical question. Preliminary assignments are designed to prepare you to write such an essay.

Step 1: Article Review

Select a general area which interests you and begin investigating current scholarly research on that topic. Use the library's Guide to Resources in Classics, your professor and peers to assist in finding materials. Keep track of other potentially useful bibliography, but your goal at this stage is to select one particularly intriguing article from an appropriate scholarly source and write a review of it.

A review consists of two parts -- a summary and a critique. The 200-250 word summary should accurately convey the content of the paper. It should be comprehensive and balanced, with clear sentence structure and good transitions to convey the author's line of reasoning. The 200-250 word critique is then your opportunity to comment upon the author's position, both in terms of evidence and persuasiveness of argument. Be certain to give a full bibliographic citation of your article at some point, whether in the title, introduction or a footnote.

Finally, you should conclude with a brief paragraph at the end of your review noting how this article has helped your research (or not), and where you intend to go from here in developing your project.

Example of an Article Review

Step 2: Source Analysis

The point of this assignment is to evaluate in detail the usefulness of a particular ancient source for addressing your selected historical issue. The format in which you present your analysis is open - you may write a formal essay with a thesis, present and answer a series of questions, create a hypertext website that addresses the source from a number of perspectives, etc. The only formal requirement is that after your discussion, in which you support your observations with evidence from the source itself, you present some conclusions about the usefulness of the source for the issue at hand. The nature of your evaluation will be heavily dependent on the text in question, but issues to consider might include: Where, when and why was this text written? Is it a primary or secondary source on this issue? Who is the author? What is the genre of the source? Who is the intended audience for the work? What point is the author trying to make? What sources of information were available to the author? What types of evidence does he or she employ? Do we have any contemporary corroborating or contrasting evidence?

Step 3: Annotated Bibliography & Exploratory Essay

An annotated bibliography is a list of research sources, each of which is followed by a brief note or "annotation." These annotations are quite similar to your article review; they describe the aim and content of the book or article, suggest its usefulness to your research, evaluate its method, conclusions, or reliability, and record your reactions to the source. Creating an annotated bibliography is useful, because it helps you organize your thoughts about a wide variety of materials. Creating such a list encourages you to think about the sources while you are gathering them, and allows you to keep track of which sources you find useful or intriguing and why. I am looking for a list of about five to ten items which you think will prove important to your research project.

Your bibliography will also include a one page essay that gives a narrative account of your thought process as you have been exploring questions and problems within your selected field. You should include both external details (what you read, how you found it, who you talked to) and internal, mental details (what you were thinking about, how your ideas changed as a result of the reading). It is not critical to reach a final position -- the reader is interested in your process, not the final product. Describe how new ideas led you to reformulate your interest, expand or narrow your focus, etc. Conclude with a few comments on what you intend to do now, and what you have left to do before you can articulate your argument.

Step 3: Oral Report

You will have exactly 3-4 minutes in class to summarize the problem you are investigating and the varied positions you have found historians to be taking upon it. You may also indicate the position which you intend to argue in your paper. This will be a formal presentation; consider your audience to be scholars at a conference, not necessarily experts in Roman history, but professional historians.

Step 4: Position Paper Submitted for Peer Review

Compose an essay defending a position on the historical question you have investigated. Use the introduction to engage your reader's interest in the problem; introduce the topic, and explain why the question is both significant and problematic in the field of Roman history. Your introduction should close with a statement of your own position on the problem at hand. The body of your essay will then be your defense of this position made as persuasive as possible through appropriate analysis and argumentation, including effective use of evidence and the appropriate attribution of ideas to the scholars whose work you have investigated.

Students will then work with each other over the succeeding week to improve their presentations. Small groups will be created based on related topics. These groups will meet together under the supervision of a tutor from the MAX Center to read each other's work and provide constructive criticism. Everyone will then have at least a week remaining in which to make use of this criticism and improve their final papers.

Step 5: Final Submission Due in Class on Friday, May 4

Guide Used to Evaluate Research Papers

Course Homepage ~ Classics Department ~ Macalester College

Beth Severy-Hoven, Macalester College
4/28/2004