Skill Three: Reading and Evaluating Research Proposals
Research proposals (such as the one that will be the final product of this class) are an important kind of academic writing that rarely gets publicized, and are even sometimes kind of hard to find. Nevertheless, research proposals make the academic world go 'round, since they are the basis upon which research funds are allocated. Before you write a research proposal (thesis prospectus) then, you are best advised to read and evaluate some other people's. We will play a little game in which we will give you a series of three research proposals in biological anthropology, and three in cultural anthropology, with the names taken off, and have you act as if you were the evaluation committee, using the criteria we have used for evaluating academic writing to judge and rank the proposals in order of their potential for generating good academic writing.
Schedule
M April 26: Come to class with your rankings of the biological anthropoogy proposals and an explanation of how and why you ranked them as you did according to our criteria. We will spend the hour haggling over our rankings, to see who gets the imaginary funds.
W April 28: Same thing for the cultural proposals.
Class schedule
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