Guidelines on Writing a Research Proposal

Guidelines on writing a interrogation object creation This is a guide to writing M. A. research projects. The like principles apply to dissertation intentions and to proposals to most financial support agencies. It includes a model outline, nevertheless adviser, charge and funding agency expectations vary and your proposal leave be a mutation on this basic theme. delectation these guidelines as a point of departure for discussions with your advisor. They may serve as a straw-man against which to pretend your instinct of both your project and of proposal writing.For USM students, the same rules apply as for proposals e rattling state of affairs in the world. marriage offer Writing device writing is distinguished to your pursuit of a graduate degree. The proposal specifies what you go forth do, how you allow do it, and how you leave behind interpret the results. In specifying what leave be through it as well as gives criteria for determining whether it is d s ingle. In approving the proposal, your delegation gives their best judgment that the onslaught to the research is reason fitted and likely to yield the pass judgment results. Both parties bene tick off from an agreed upon plan.The objective in writing a proposal is to describe what you leave behind do, wherefore it should be make, how you leave do it and what you expect entrust result. Being forgive nearly these things from the base volition protagonist you complete your dissertation in a timely fashion. A non bad(predicate) thesis proposal hinges on a good musical theme. Once you beat a good idea, you stick out skeleton the proposal in an purgeing. Getting a good idea hinges on old(prenominal)ity with the field. This assumes a longer preparatory period of rakeing, observation, discussion, and incubation. point everything that you tail assembly in your argona of inte lie down. look-alike out what ar the primary(prenominal) and wanting(p) parts of our unde rstanding. Figure out how to haoma/discover those pieces. Live and breathe the guinea pig. take to task about it with anyone who is interested. Then unspoilt compile the important parts as the proposal. woof in the things that we do non drive in and that exit help us shaft much than that is what research is all about. Proposals help you estimate the size of a project. Dont bring up the project too big. Your proposal leave behind be mayhap fin pages and for sure no more than fifteen pages long. For perspective, the Ameri apprize National scholarship Foundation limits the space of proposal narratives to 15 pages, even when the request might be for multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is the moral excellence of the proposal which counts, not the weight. ) Shoot for five pithy pages that indicate to a relatively well-informed audience that you know the consequence and how its logic hangs to goher, rather than fifteen or twenty pages that indicate that you corroborate read a lot of things but not yet boiled it down to a set of prioritized linked querys.Different Theses, comparable Proposals In the abstract all proposals are very similar. They fate to doom a reasonably informed contributor why a particular composition is important to parcel out and how you will do it. To that end, a proposal privations to give tongue to how your snip fits into what is already known about the issue and what hot contribution your field will make. Specify the interrogative that your research will service, establish why it is a fast(a) apparent motion, show how you are going to resolve the question, and indicate what you expect we will check up on.The proposal should ascertain the work in the publications, it should show why this is an (if not the most) important question to dish in the field, and convince your mission that your plan of attack will in feature result in an attend to to the question. Theses which shell out resear ch questions that cigaret be answered by making plan-able observations (and hypothesis testing) are like and perhaps the easiest to make unnecessary. Beca function they address well-bounded topics, they can be very tight, but they do lease more planning on the earlier end. Theses which re largely based on synthesis of observations, rumination, speculation, and opinion formation are harder to write, and usually not as convincing, oftentimes beca consumption they address questions which are not well-bounded and basically unanswerable. Literature analyse-based theses involve collection of entropy from the books, distillation of it, and coming up with new insight on an issue. One occupation with this type of research is that you might go on the perfect succinct answer to your question on the night before (or after) you crop in the final draft in umpteenone elses work.This certainly can thump the wind out of your sails. (But note that even a straight-ahead science thesis can have the problem of late in the game discovering that the work you have make or are doing has already been done, this is where familiarity with the pertinent writings by both yourself and your committee members is important. ) A Couple of puzzles for Proposals A twain Page (Preliminary Proposal) Model Here is a model for a very design (maybe five dissever) proposal that you might use to interest faculty in seated on your committee. People who are not yet hooked may oddly appreciate its brevity.In the bring downle paragraph, the first convict identifies the general topic rural area. The entropy destine gives the research question, and the third sentence establishes its significance. The next couple of paragraphs gives the larger historical perspective on the topic. Essentially count the major schools of thought on the topic and very briefly review the literature in the area with its major findings. Who has compose on the topic and what have they put? Allocate about a sentence per important person or finding. embroil any preliminary findings you have, and indicate what have questions are left.Restate your question in this context, showing how it fits into this larger picture. The next paragraph describes your methodology. It reports how will you approach the question, what you will contract to do it. The final paragraph outlines your expect results, how you will interpret them, and how they will fit into the our larger understanding i. e. , the literature. The (Longer) Standard Model The Basic Thesis Outline accession Topic area investigate question (finding? ) Significance to friendship Literature review Previous research some others & yours Interlocking findings and unanswered questionsYour preliminary work on the topic The remaining questions and inter-locking logic Reprise of your research question(s) in this context methodology onward motion Data take Analytic techniques proposal for interpreting results Results Discussi on and Conclusions Bibliography You provoke the idea of what the proposal does for you and organizing your thoughts and approach. The section below goes into somewhat more (boring) detail on what severally of the points in the outline is and does. The Sections of the Proposal The Introduction Topic Area A good title will clue the subscriber into the topic but it cannot tell the altogether story.Follow the title with a strong introduction. The introduction provides a brief overview that tells a fairly well informed (but perhaps non-specialist) reader what the proposal is about. It might be as short as a single page, but it should be very clearly written, and it should let one judge whether the research is relevant to their own. With luck it will hook the readers interest. What is your proposal about? saddle horse the topical area is a start but you need more, and quickly. Get precise about what your research will address. brain Once the topic is established, come right to the point.What are you doing? What specific issue or question will your work address? really briefly (this is still the introduction) reckon how you will approach the work. What will we learn from your work? Significance Why is this work important? Show why this is it important to answer this question. What are the implications of doing it? How does it link to other knowledge? How does it stand to inform constitution making? This should show how this project is solid to our body of knowledge. Why is it important to our understanding of the world? It should establish why I would want to read on.It should also tell me why I would want to support, or fund, the project. Literature freshen State of our knowledge The purpose of the literature review is to bushel your research in the context of what is already known about a topic. It need not be exhaustive it needs to show how your work will make the whole. It should provide the theoretical basis for your work, show what has been do ne in the area by others, and set the stage for your work. In a literature review you should give the reader enough ties to the literature that they feel sure-footed that you have imbed, read, and assimilated the literature in the field.It should probably move from the more general to the more nidused studies, but need not be exhaustive, sole(prenominal) relevant. Outstanding questions This is where you take the holes in the knowledge that need to be plugged and by so doing, situate your work. It is the place where you establish that your work will fit in and be of import to the discipline. This can be made easier if at that place is literature that comes out and says Hey, this is a topic that needs to be treated What is the answer to this question? and you will sometimes touch this type of piece in the literature. Research Questions in DetailYour work to see Tell what you have done so far. It might report preliminary studies that you have conducted to establish the feasib ility of your research. It should give a sense that you are in a position to add to the body of knowledge. Methodology Overview of approach This section should make clear to the reader the way that you intend to approach the research question and the techniques and logic that you will use to address it. Data disposition This might include the field range description, a description of the instruments you will use, and curiously the knowledge that you forecast collecting.You may need to comment on site and choice accessibility in the time set up and budget that you have addressable, to demonstrate feasibility, but the emphasis in this section should be to fully describe specifically what data you will be using in your study. Part of the purpose of doing this is to detect flaws in the plan before they become problems in the research. Data Analysis This should explain in some detail how you will fake the data that you assembled to get at the information that you will use to an swer your question.It will include the tools that you will use in processing the data, such as the type of interviews you will undertake, statistical software and techniques (if youre doing a quantitative study), survey instruments, or any innovative approach youre developing. It probably should also include an reading material of the range of outcomes that you could reasonably expect from your observations. rendering In this section you should indicate how the anticipate outcomes will be interpreted to answer the research question.It is extremely beneficial to anticipate the range of outcomes from your abbreviation, and for each know what it will mean in terms of the answer to your question. Expected Results This section should give a good indication of what you expect to get out of the research. It should join the data analysis and possible outcomes to the theory and questions that you have raised. It will be a good place to summarize the significance of the work. It is often effective from the very beginning of formulating your work to write one page for this section to focalisation your reasoning as you build the rest of the proposal.Bibliography This is the list of the relevant works. There is no reason to cite irrelevant literature but it may be useful to keep track of it even if only to say that it was examined and found to be irrelevant. Use a standard format. Order the personas alphabetically. Tips and Tricks guide. Read everything you can find in your area of interest. Read. Read. Read. Take notes, and talk to your advisor about the topic. If your advisor wont talk to you, find other one or rely on the net for intellectual interaction.Email has the advantage of forcing you to get your thoughts into written words that can be refined, edited and improved. It also gets time stamped records of when you submitted what to your advisor and how long it took to get a response. hold open about the topic a lot, and dont be afraid to tear up (delete) passages that just dont work. Often you can re-think and re-type faster than than you can edit your way out of a hopeless mess. The advantage is in the re-thinking. Very early on, generate the research question, scathing observation, interpretations of the possible outcomes, and the expected results.These are the inwardness of the project and will help focus your reading and thinking. Modify them as take as your understanding increases. Use some systematic way of recording notes and bibliographical information from the very beginning. The classic approach is a deck of baron cards. You can sort, regroup, layout spatial arrangements and work on the beach. peradventure a slight improvement is to use a word-processor file that contains bibliographic reference information and notes, quotes etc. that you take from the source. This can be sorted, searched, diced and sliced in your familiar word-processor.You may even print the index cards from the word-processor if you like the abili ty to physically re-arrange things. Even better for some, is to use vary bibliographic database software. Papyrus, Journler, EndNote, and other packages are available for PCs and MacIntoshs. Another pointer is to keep in mind from the outset that this project is uncomplete the last nor the greatest thing you will do in your life. It is just one step along the way. Get it done and get on with the next one. go along your topic, but dont confuse it with too many loosely relevant side lines.The dimension between Introduction and Literature Review needs to be thought out. The reader will want to be able to figure out whether to read the proposal. The literature review should be sufficiently comprehensive that the reader can tell where the jump of knowledge lie. It should also show what has been done and what seem to be accepted approaches in the field and the kinds of results that are being gotten. useable References Krathwohl, David R. 1988. How to Prepare a Research Proposal Gui delines for Funding and Dissertations in the Social and behavioural Sciences . Syracuse University Press.Recent National Science Foundations Guidelines for Research Proposals can be found on the NSF website, www. nsf. gov. Chamberlain, T. C. The Method of Multiple work Hypotheses, reprinted in Science, Vol 148, pp754-759. 7 May 1965. Platt, J. untouchable Inference in Science, Number 3642, pp. 347-353, 16 October 1964. Strunk and White The Elements of Style Turabian, Kate. 1955 (or a more recent edition) A Manual for Writers of line Papers, Theses and Dissertations, University of Chicago Press. Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. 1940 (67, 72 etc). How to Read a Book. Simon and Schuster Publishers. New York City, NY.