Research Paper Evaluation Criteria

I. Sources: Does the paper use the right kinds of scholarly or popular-scholarly
sources to support its claims?

        While no number of sources can be called automatically "enough," the

assignment requires that you find sources of sufficient quality to support what you say
you know about your topic. Scholarly sources are preferable, but in some disciplines
the popular-scholarly source can be used for support if corroborated by scholarly
sources. See me for advice about this.  In the end, though, one of the most complex
and subtle measures of your readiness for upper-division college writing will be your
ability to match source quantity and quality to the strength of claims made by your
thesis and the demands your readers are likely to make.

Is the paper based on at least some  recent article-length sources?

        Articles are the sources of the most recent and most tightly focused analysis on
your topic. Students who rely on books because the Library catalogue is easier to use,
or because books appear to have "more on the topic," are still thinking at a pre-college
level.  They do not understand how quickly book-length manuscripts become
outdated, and how books' much larger theses can make it difficult for students to
extract useful support from them without misunderstanding what they are borrowing.

Does it use at least one scholarly source, or does it contain a well-written endnote
or footnote which explains exactly why there are no scholarly sources available
on this topic?

        Take seriously the task of reading scholarship in your field. The popular works
available will not give you the authority to say things that will persuade your
professors. You can use popular-scholarly journals and scholarly reference works to
give you a "ladder of expertise" so that you can read professional scholars' work, but
you eventually will have to join the dialogue they are conducting several times each
year in their field's scholarly journals.  You can learn a lot from "negative success" at
reading scholarly work, too.  If you are trying your hardest, using all the aids available
(including asking teachers in the subject for help), and you still cannot read the
scholarship near the end of your first year of study, you probably should rethink your
intended major.

If the topic requires it, are the sources recent enough to be persuasive?

        Scholarship in the social and natural sciences becomes outdated quickly.
Conclusions based on out of date evidence fail to persuade. Students who want to
succeed in these majors must become persistent enough researchers to seek out the
most recent and authoritative sources on their topics.  Humanities sources have
undergone immense theoretical upheavals in the last decades of the Twentieth
Century, and for many fields, secondary scholarship written much before 1980 can be
suspect or unacceptable because its analytical methods are controlled by theoretical
assumptions that are no longer acceptable.  The fields cannot engage in wholesale
book-burning and web-site erasure to eliminate these problematic sources, but an
early part of Humanities' majors' upper-division work involves becoming familiar
with the currently acceptable theories and analytical methods, and with the sources
from earlier scholars work which are still acceptable.

II. Thesis: Is the paper organized by an independent thesis which at least uses
reasoning and/or evidence from one article to contribute substantively to the
reasoning and/or evidence in any other article, thus avoiding mere summary of
the research?  Is the thesis carefully composed to avoid claiming absolute
knowledge if its evidence supports only possible or probable conclusions?  Is the
thesis supported by logically sound reasoning?

        These questions are asking whether the author has moved beyond the stage of
merely reporting what others say, and into the stage of being able to think creatively
about the topic. Early attempts to do this may be tentative and uncertain. To protect
your reputation for careful thinking, make sure you distinguish clearly among certain,
probable, and possible conclusions.  Be content to claim your conclusions are
"possibly" correct unless you can eliminate many of the contending conclusions to
claim they are "probably' correct.  Do not claim your conclusions "certainly" explain
the evidence unless you have eliminated all alternative explanations.  Logical fallacies
often arise because writers unconsciously struggle to force their research to support to
their earliest intuitions, guesses, hunches, or hypotheses about what is true.  (Think of
how often you heard high-school writers say "I'm going to do some research to get
sources that support my thesis.")  Beware your own prejudices about what you think
the evidence will reveal before you've impartially examined it.  Let the evidence speak
and you can hardly go far wrong.

III. Audience: Does the paper address a scholarly audience and correctly
estimate the level of knowledge that audience can be expected to possess?  Does it
avoid telling experts obvious things, like defining terms of art or basic concepts,
providing needless "background," and identifying experts to each other with
unnecessary specificity (e.g., "the biologist Lewis Thomas" in a paper addressed
to biologists)?  Does it always specify the source of generalizations about evidence
by correct citations of scholarship?
        Writing like professional scholar takes practice, but now is the time to start. Look
carefully at the ways your sources establish the tone of their relationship with their
own readers. Notice what things the writers assume their audiences know and what
things they take care to reveal about their sources and methods. Then, do what they do
in your own paper.

IV. Mechanics and Documentation: Does the paper use standard academic
English usage and sentence construction, coherent and well-ordered paragraphs,
logical paragraph transition, and a fully functional title, introduction, and
conclusion?  Does the paper accurately and consistently use a documentation
style appropriate to the discipline (MLA, APA, CBE, or U. Chicago), or does it at
least use MLA style accurately and consistently?

        This set of questions is really an extension of III. above, but it's such an
important element of research writing for 200- and 300-level courses that it's worth its
own weighted evaluation in this project. Failure to write grammatically when making
a scholarly claim automatically exposes the writer to suspicion that the basic thinking
underlying the paper is faulty, too. This is especially difficult for student writers
because when the mind must concentrate on difficult, newly learned concepts and
methods, grammar and syntax almost always deteriorate.  The Writing Center tutors'
help will be more important than ever when your intellectual efforts are most
challenged by your topic and your readers' expectations.  Involve the tutors you work
with in your brainstorming, and in your early drafting, not just in your proof-reading
of the final draft.

        Be especially careful when using terms of art and jargon from the discipline
you're just entering.  As an "apprentice," you may make mistakes that a more
experienced scholar would not make, and they're the kind of mistakes that damage
your authority, so you should pay special attention to those peculiar kinds of words
and phrases.  Are you using them as and when a specialist would use them?  For in
intriguing website that explains Computer Science jargon, see Jargon 4.2.0, by Arjan
de Mes at University of Amsterdam.  It's a little out of date by now because it was last
updated in 2000, but many of its terms are still in use.

        Double your efforts to proofread your final draft in order to catch these old errors
that will come back when you least want them to appear. You can prevent one typical
source of dangerous errors if you start your paper's first draft with a list of sources as
you accumulate them in your research, properly formatted in the documentation style
appropriate for your topic's discipline. This is far to important to leave for the last five
minutes of the writing process, and if you develop the habit of doing it early you will
save yourself countless disappointments in later papers.  Just build the paper on top of
that source list, and add to it every time you develop a new source, and you can spend
your last hours polishing your prose rather than worrying about documentation
format.

        If you compare these questions with those I was asking of the Film and
Hawthorne papers, you will notice that there are only four rather than five.  The
earlier questions have been reorganized to focus far more on the use of sources, and
on the author's relationship with the scholarly audience and the evidence acquired
from the sources.  This assignment, like the "PPR" at the start of the semester, is
another "bridge" paper, but this one is heading to a higher level of authority.  It
collapses some of the previous two papers' concerns for rhetorical coherence,
mechanical errors, and format, into one big heading, but it does not omit them.  You
still have to write clean prose in upper division courses, but just avoiding errors will
not produce a successful paper.  Try to keep your writing process balanced to allow
time for all four of these major elements of writing quality.