UPDATE: All meetings will be held in my office, Humanities 330, according to this schedule.

Before coming to your meeting next week to discuss your rough drafts, you should write a brief peer review memo to share with the person whose paper you read. I will count this memo towards your class participation grade.

Remember to avoid the pitfalls in peer-reviewing that we have talked about in class. Don’t give your partner’s paper a superficial reading; respect him or her enough to really engage with this piece of writing that he or she has worked hard to produce. Similarly, don’t be afraid of criticizing the draft for fear of being negative; receiving nothing but compliments will not help your partner improve his or her draft. But you should also avoid making your critique personal; avoid “you” statements (like, “you’re not making sense here) in favor of statements that focus on the paper (“this paragraph could be clearer if …”)

When writing this memo, you should offer your comments both as a reader of the rough draft (which will allow you to tell your partner how at least one reader understood the work) and as a fellow author (which will allow you to make recommendations and give advice based on your own experience with writing a paper.)

Here is the specific checklist that your peer review memo should follow. Completing these questions well should mean that your memo is no less than 300-600 words. But try not to let your memo run beyond a maximum limit of 800-1,000 words. There is only so much advice and feedback an author can take at one time!

1. Summarize, in no more than a few sentences, the question or problem that the paper is trying to answer or solve.

2. Summarize, in a sentence or two, the author’s thesis–his or her answer or solution to the question or problem you identified in #1. (If you have difficulty with #1 or #2, you may want to focus your recommendations in #7 on helping the author clarify the question or thesis.)

3. Place a wavy line in the margins next to all of the places in the draft that were unclear to you as a reader.

4. Write a paragraph summarizing your assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the argument of the draft. (For example, is the thesis supported by persuasive reasons? Does the thesis seem to make a contribution to an existing debate of some kind among historians? Are there counter-arguments that the author does not seem aware of, or does not sufficiently address? Where do you agree or disagree?)

5. Reread the draft, then write a paragraph focusing solely on the author’s use of evidence. Are there sufficient pieces of evidence, drawn primarily from primary sources, that support the author’s small and larger claims? Does the writer need to do more research?

6. Write out at least two things that are particularly strong about this draft.

7. Make three or four specific recommendations about specific changes the writer should make in the next draft.

Don’t forget to turn in your proposals and sign up for a time to meet with me.

Also, as we discussed in class last week, you should use this proposal and all future "benchmark" assignments as a way to start practicing Chicago Manual of Style formatting for your bibliographic citations. Historians usually use the "note-bibliography" Chicago system to cite sources, so that’s what you should use for your proposal, your drafts, and your final paper. Here are some useful links:

• The full Chicago Manual, online and searchable
• The documentation chapter in the Manual
• The Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide
• The corrected student examples that we worked on in class

Remember that getting the format wrong a few times can actually help you learn the right way more effectively. So do your absolute best to conform to the style from here on out. That way you can learn common mistakes before it counts on your final paper.

The next "benchmark" assignment you need to complete for your research paper is a 2-3 page (double-spaced) proposal, emailed directly to me. The deadline is 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, October 21.

The proposal differs from your two topics memo in a few crucial ways. The first and most obvious is that you should eliminate one of your two proposed topics and write a proposal based only on one research topic. The proposal should also be written as an essay with complete sentences and paragraphs, so in that sense it should be more formal than the "two topics" memo.

A more subtle difference is that your proposal should talk about the major question you want to answer about your topic. (Our discussion in class today about the difference between a topic and a question should help you some here.) In addition, it should explain how you plan to answer the question (i.e., the "background questions" we discussed in class), provide a list of secondary and primary sources that you plan to consult, and explicitly discuss the significance of your question/research for a broader scholarly audience.

Obviously, at this stage in your research, you may not be able to predict what your answer to the question (your thesis) will be. And your research question may even change after this week as you delve further into sources about your topic. That’s okay. But even at this very early stage, it’s important to have some kind of map for doing your research. You should think of the proposal partly as that map. It will identify what you want to know, explain how you plan to go about finding it out, and offer some thoughts about why other historians will want (and need) to know what you’ve found.

Most importantly, drafting a proposal at this stage will force you beyond simply thinking about "what I’m going to find out" about a topic to some hypotheses about "what I’m going to argue" about a topic.

So, to sum up, here’s what your 2-3 page proposal should do:

• Briefly describe the topic you’ve chosen (the shortest part, since you’ve already told me a little bit about your topics)
• Identify a main ("foreground") question or set of questions you want to answer about the topic
• Explain why this question is significant (some questions to get you thinking about this might be: has your question never even been asked before? if it has, have other historians gone about answering it differently? do you think it may challenge an existing interpretation among historians? address one of the "big questions" that have occupied historians of utopian communities? help settle a debate among historians? reveal some larger truth about American history in the period?)
• Propose how you will answer this question (e.g., what specific kinds of sources will you consult? where will you get these sources from? how will these sources help you answer your question?)
• If you can, you may also briefly hypothesize, based on the limited research you’ve done already, about the answer you expect to find, but you don’t want to be wedded to an answer at this stage.
• Provide a provisional bibliography of secondary sources and primary sources you will consult. This should be as complete as it can be, but you’re not locking yourself in to looking at everything you list. Likewise, this list does not mean these are the only sources you’ll look at. I may suggest more or different sources you need to consult. When it comes to primary sources, you can also be general; for example, you can give the name of a person whose letters you will consult, or the title of a newspaper that may contain articles on your subject, rather than listing every letter or every article). But this bibliography should represent a brief progress report on the most relevant sources you’ve already found, and should do so using the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition.

Remember, the proposal can fit in 3 pages, so it won’t be extensively detailed. Use our discussion of the sample proposals in class to guide you. The important thing here is big-picture thinking and planning about your next steps.