Essay Assignment - How to Write Political Essay?

Essay Assignment

Instructions

This is the topic for the essay that you will write for this class. Your essay should be about 8 pages in length, typed double-spaced. It must be submitted via the SafeAssignment link on Blackboard by the beginning of class on and will represent 25% of your course grade. If you are intending to do a senior thesis for Political Science, then this assignment could provide you with an opportunity to begin the research leading to that thesis project.

Topic

Choose one of the aspects of state politics taught in the course, such as a California initiative proposition, and then analyze it using further sources.

There are a number of theories, approaches, perspectives, models and paradigms presented in the readings and lectures. In order to do this essay assignment well, you will need to do some research on the issue you choose. That will involve using academic literature, newspaper and peer-reviewed journal articles, and appropriate internet resources. This assignment is a hybrid between an essay and a term paper. Like an essay for a course, it requires you to argue a thesis drawn from course materials. Like a term paper, it requires you to do some library research to supplement those course materials.

I am not a stickler about formatting issues, but please do use some standard for your footnotes/endnotes and references/bibliography. Chicago is my favorite format, but MLA, APA, ASA or any standardized style will work. Please consult a manual of style when formatting your footnotes and bibliography. It is also important that you provide full citations. If you use an article from JStor, please provide the name of the journal, the volume and number the article was in and the pages it was in, and not merely the URL for the source. Also, it may be useful to consult Wikipedia when beginning your paper, but you should always find more credible sources for every fact you cite or claim you make. Remember that Wikipedia is not peer-reviewed, and anyone can edit its articles. Thus, this online encyclopedia may provide good leads which you can follow up and verify, but you should NEVER quote it, paraphrase it or cite it as the ultimate source for anything.

Finally, you should note well that you are to write an analytical essay rather than simply a term paper. Please be aware that your essay should clearly fit within the materials learned within this class. If it appears that taking this class has added no value to your project, then it will be much harder to award a satisfactory grade.