For this week’s Proposal (the first step in our unified, multi-step Research Paper process, consisting also of Short Paper 2: The Annotated Bibliography and the Research Paper itself), you are tasked with the following:

Choose a broad sociopolitical topic, like those listed in Themes for Exploration in Critical Writing and the Research Paper (week 1) then, find a more specific, and singular but complex, question at issue within that broader topic that you are interested in researching and writing about for the next several weeks (a “question at issue”) and come up with whatever your argumentative stance is, at the moment, on that question (your “tentative thesis”); then, set up your document in the following format, filling in your choices after each listed element (Topic, Question at Issue, Thesis):

• Underneath the title (and other MLA formatting of the page): 
  • Topic:
  • Question at Issue:
  • Tentative Thesis: