Each student will confer with the instructor at the beginning of the course to determine the type and length of his/her class project. The project must be one of the following:

• at least one chapter of a dissertation
• at least two chapters of a master's thesis
• a publishable journal paper
• a dissertation proposal (or substantial portion of it)
• a departmental or graduate school report (or substantial portion)

We then break this project down into your tri-weekly assignments 1, 2, and 3. For instance, if your class project is to complete the methodology chapter of your Ph.D. dissertation, your first assignment might be to complete 1/3 of the chapter, your second assignment to write the next 1/3, and your third assignment (project draft) to rewrite the first two-thirds and add the last 1/3. Or you might be doing a journal paper and break the assignments into 1/2 the paper, 1/2 the paper, and a rewrite of the entire paper.

These are the constraints we put on everyone's assignments:

• Only one of your assignments may be entirely a rewrite.
• The third assignment must be as close as possible to a draft of the entire class project.

The first week of class, I ask you to write an outline of your entire publishable document (dissertation, thesis, etc.). This outline will help me understand how your class project fits into the document you are preparing for publication. Of course your class project and your publishable document may be one and the same (as in the case of a journal paper).

The three bi-weekly written assignments are worth 40% of your final grade (10%, 15%, and 15%). Your final project is worth 30% of your grade.

Back to top