Understanding the Assignment

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We discuss the following topics on this page:

• Intended Audience for the Project
• Purpose of the Project
• Understanding the Assignment Prompts, Guidelines, and Expectations
• The Role of Analysis in Research Projects
• Key Takeaways

Be sure you fully understand the assignment before you begin research. If there are terms in the assignment you don’t understand or methods you don’t yet know how to do, you will need to obtain this knowledge as soon as possible. The best source for information about your assignment is the person who gave the assignment (usually your instructor). For additional help understanding the assignment, visit the UCF Writing Center.

Jada’s assignment was to write a 10-12 page paper that analyzed a work of literature (she chose James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”) while employing two schools of criticism and citing five scholarly sources using the MLA format. This is a fairly common but deceptively complex literary studies research assignment. Instructors might also stipulate that your research includes biographical or historical information about your chosen subject. Other kinds of research can include textual analysis, comparative readings, genre studies, or theory-based approaches. We discuss various theories and methods in future modules. For now we will discuss four major types of research projects. These include 1) interpretive, 2) critical, 3) historical, and 4) creative.

Intended Audience for the Project

Audience awareness is an important aspect of good writing (and one we will discuss many times throughout this course). If your instructor does not stipulate an intended audience, assume you are writing for a journal of literary studies and that your classmates or other students and literary scholars are your imagined audience. It can be tempting to think of your instructor as your audience since they will be reading and grading your paper. However, you should avoid doing so unless told otherwise. Rather, think of your instructor as an editor who gives an assignment and evaluates your work for publication. The true “audience” in this case would be the readers of your real or imagined journal.

Different journals and conferences favor certain kinds of research over others and you should explore a few journals to see what kinds of research they publish. It is useful to review the submission guidelines for various literary journals and conferences to find out what kinds of research they prefer. Many journals publish articles with very specific formatting and methodology requirements, and learning about them can provide insight to beginning researchers. By studying the field, you can also be more prepared if or when you’re considering graduate school or are thinking about writing beyond class assignments. Publishing and presenting on a more professional level await!

Purpose of the Project

The typical purpose of a research paper in literary studies is to convince an audience to share your conclusion about a work of literature (or about a genre, a historical period, an author, a theory, etc.). Thus, you want to make a well-supported case to convince your reader to adopt your understanding and not some other understanding. The research method you choose (and your effectiveness in using it) will determine whether you succeed.

Understanding the Assignment Prompts, Guidelines, and Expectations

It’s common to begin a research project with a broad topic that you refine and focus throughout your research. Jada’s journey started with a general interest in James Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” but became a more clear, complex, and focused question that drove her research.

First, Jada needed to know the parameters of the assignment. Instructors may provide a specific prompt focused on a particular literary work, an author, a literary form, a historical period, a theme, a theory, a method, or some other aspect of literary studies or the instructor may offer a choice of prompts. The instructor may require that your paper argue for or against a certain proposition. Alternatively the instructor may leave the assignment open-ended, requiring students to identify their own topic and produce their own prompt (otherwise known as a research question).

In addition, the instructor may list other requirements for your research project such as page length, number and type of sources, citation format, style guidelines, etc. Be sure to familiarize yourself with all these requirements before you begin your project; you don’t want to get to the deadline only to realize you needed five more citations, your paper is five pages too short, and you don’t know the difference between MLA and APA formats. The best source for information about the research paper guidelines is your instructor. If you have questions about the assignment or just want to go over the requirements before you begin your work, please ask your instructor for help. They are there to help you!

The Role of Analysis in Research Projects

Research projects should make arguments, which are not to be confused with analysis. An analysis does not necessarily pose any arguments. Any research project must include some analysis, but this analysis must be used to support an interpretive, critical, or historical claim (or to give a creative work some rhetorical agency).

Analytical work will help you better understand a literary text. The goal of analysis is to describe what type a text is, how it functions, what its parts or elements are, and how it achieves its effects. You must do an analysis, but you should not stop with one; an analysis is a necessary step to creating an argument. Later in this course we will discuss how you use analysis to build your arguments.

The following pages will include more details about types of research projects, Jada’s project, including short videos of her discussing her approach to finding resources, establishing relevance, refining and evaluating her research question, and managing her research.