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ENG 106 Spring 2023

Writing Project 3: Research Conversation Essay

  • WP 3 first draft for peer review workshop due: Wednesday, April 12 by class
  • WP 3 due: Friday, April 14
  • MLA citation style
  • ~1500 words (~4-5 pages double-spaced)
  • Turn in via Blackboard
    • If you participated in the peer review workshop, please also turn in the peer review worksheet your reader(s) completed

Your third major writing project in this class is about discovering and understanding what scholars have written about Their Eyes Were Watching God and/or Zora Neale Hurston’s writing more generally. You will write an essay in which you place at least two scholarly articles, essays, or book chapters about Their Eyes Were Watching God and/or Hurston’s other writing in conversation with one another, focusing not only on what ideas or concepts these scholarly texts have in common, but also, and perhaps more importantly, on how they are different. Your goal is to write a seamless, well-organized essay in which you place these scholarly texts in conversation with one another.

You’ve already started your research conversation essay by completing journal entry 6 and journal entry 7. In those journal entries, you conducted research to learn about some of the ongoing conversations among scholars about Hurston’s work, and you identified and analyzed one topic that cuts across two of your sources. You will now expand on those skills to write your research conversation essay. I strongly recommend using the scholarly texts you write about in journal entries 6 and 7 in your research conversation essay, but you are not required to.

What is a Research Conversation Essay?

In your first writing project in this class, you practiced close reading, textual analysis, and argumentation. In your second writing project, you practiced these skills in addition to working with primary sources to better understand and articulate the historical context of a literary text. The final step in learning how to write strong academic essays in the humanities involves understanding and incorporating the work of other scholars into your own (following proper citational practices, of course). Conducting academic research in literary studies and in the humanities more broadly means entering into a conversation with other scholars who have also written about the topic you are investigating. This involves 1) understanding and articulating the arguments they make; and 2) understanding and articulating how these arguments both inform and differ from your own. We will practice these skills by writing what I’m calling a research conversation essay.

Discovering and Selecting Your Scholarly Sources

The first step in completing your research conversation essay is discovering scholarly sources about your topic (in this case, something related to Their Eyes Were Watching God or Zora Neale Hurston’s writing more broadly) and selecting which sources to write in more detail about. In class on Friday, March 24 and Wednesday, March 29, we will cover the nuts and bolts of how to use library resources to conduct research in the humanities using secondary sources by scholars. For journal entry 6, you will specify your research topic and survey existing scholarship on that topic. You will come up with a preliminary list of 5 scholarly sources related to that topic, and from that list, you will select 2 scholarly sources to focus on in journal entry 7 and in your research conversation essay. One of these scholarly sources can be a source we read together in class (either Lamothe or Mitchell), but one must be a scholarly source that you discover on your own (but also, you not required to write about the pieces by Lamothe or Mitchell if you discover other sources you would rather write about).

We will talk about what a “scholarly source” is in class. But in brief, a scholarly source is a source that:

  • Is written by an expert or experts in the topic under investigation. Usually, this will mean that they have a PhD in a discipline related to this topic and that they are employed by a university, but this is not always the case.
  • Is published in a venue that focuses on academic research and scholarship and whose primary audience is other researchers and scholars. Usually, this will be an academic journal, or a book or an edited collection published by a university press, but this is not always the case.

How to Write Your Research Conversation Essay

After conducting your preliminary research and deciding which 2 scholarly sources to write about, you should complete the following steps:

Step 1: Identify the 2-3 shared concepts or ideas that cut across both of your scholarly sources

You will structure your research conversation essay around 2 or 3 concepts or ideas that cut across both of your scholarly sources. For example, if you choose to write about Lamothe’s article and another scholarly source focused on religious imagery in Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of the concepts or ideas you decide to focus on might be Hurston’s use of religious imagery in the novel. If you choose to write about Mitchell’s article and another scholarly source focused on Hurston’s political writings, one of the concepts or ideas you decide to focus on might be Hurston’s critique of colonialism. The point here is that you will identify 2 or 3 ideas or concepts that are discussed in both of your scholarly sources. You will write about 1 of these shared ideas or concepts in journal entry 7.

Step 2: Analyze what your scholarly sources claim about these shared concepts or ideas

In your research conversation essay, you will need to succinctly articulate what each scholarly source says about each shared concept or idea, and to compare and/or contrast each scholar’s positions on these shared concepts or ideas. My strong recommendation is to focus on the differences between your sources in regard to each shared concept or idea. How do each of your sources approach each shared concept or idea differently? What do they each say about each shared concept or idea, and how is what they say different from each other? Again, you will begin this process by writing about 1 shared concept or idea in journal entry 7.

Step 3: Write your research conversation essay

Your research conversation essay should be structured around the shared concepts and ideas you identified and analyzed in steps 1 and 2 above. Unlike the essays you wrote for writing projects 1 and 2 in this class, your research conversation essay will not necessarily include an original interpretive claim. Instead, this essay is about clearly articulating the ideas of others. It should be structured around a comparison of how your 2 scholarly sources grapple with the 2-3 shared concepts or ideas you have identified. This will necessarily involve including and analyzing specific textual evidence from each of your scholarly sources. For each shared concept or idea you discuss in your essay, you should include at least 1 quotation from each of your scholarly sources that speaks to that shared concept or idea (you will likely want to include more than 1 quotation from each source; 1 is a minimum).

Writing Project 3 Requirements

In order to be considered “satisfactory”, your research conversation essay must do the following:

  1. Focus on 2 scholarly sources related to your stated research topic. One of these sources can be a source that we read in class (Lamothe or Mitchell), but at least one must be a source that you discover through your own research.
  2. Include discussion of 2-3 clearly identifiable shared concepts or ideas that cut across both of your scholarly sources.
  3. Include analysis of how your selected scholarly sources grapple with each of the 2-3 shared concepts or ideas, focusing on how these sources approach these shared concepts or ideas differently. Remember, your analysis must include at least 1 quote from each scholarly source that relates to each shared concept or idea.
  4. Meet the minimum word requirement (around 1500 words) without filler.
  5. Attempt to communicate your ideas in a focused, clear, and well-organized way. If I have drawn your attention to specific issues related to clarity, style, surface conventions, analysis, and/or organization in previous writing in this class, I must see evidence of a good-faith effort to try to make progress on resolving these issues in your writing.
  6. Include properly formatted parenthetical citations of any sources you use in writing your essay, making sure to cite the page numbers on which any quotations you use appear. You should also include a Works Cited page with correctly formatted citations of each source cited in your essay.
  7. Include, at the end of the essay, the following statement: “I upheld the Honor Code.” Including these words at the end of your essay functions as your digital signature of academic integrity.
  8. Include, at the end of the essay, an updated list of the assignments you have completed in this class, including all journal entries, writing projects, and peer review workshops to date.