I hope yesterday’s in-class activity helped you get a clearer sense of how to take a broad topic, narrow it into a feasible research question, and develop methods for answering that question. I’m looking forward to reading your research proposals this weekend and meeting with you next week to discuss them. Your focus for Week 5 should be to get your research proposal approved so you can begin designing your research instrument(s). Here’s how we’ll help you accomplish that goal:

• We won’t meet as a class on Tuesday, but I will be holding individual conferences with each of you on either Monday or Tuesday, and your attendance at this conference will count for Tuesday’s class session. All conferences will be held in my office (Premont 211), and it’s important that you arrive on time (or early) for your conference. Please be ready to discuss your research proposal and any questions you have about finding sources, refining your research methods, etc…
• On Thursday, we will work as a class to create a bibliography entry like the ones you will be writing for the Annotated Bibliography assignment. Before you come to class, please read “The Composing Process of Unskilled College Writers,” by Sondra Perl (WAW, pp. 191–215). In order for our in-class exercise to work, everyone needs to be prepared, so make sure that you know the article well enough to summarize its main points from memory. (Hint: Thursday is feeling like an excellent day for our first quiz of the semester.)

Outside of class, you should be finding potential sources for your annotated bibliography. If you haven’t been to the Scarborough-Phillips Library yet, you should go sometime during Week 5. Remember, if you need help finding a specific source, our librarians are highly skilled at that sort of thing. Don’t settle for the first eight sources you find — keep searching until you find the right eight sources for your bibliography.