Instructors:

1. Choose an anthology of readable, but scholarly essays (popular culture studies are good places to start), or gather together enough essays or book chapters so that each student has his or her own essay to work with.

2. The assignment has four parts and is designed to improve these skills:

a. understanding and summarizing in writing a scholarly essay

b. discerning among various kinds of source materials

c. gathering source materials

d. understanding how sources are used to create research papers

3. In the next section I provide instructions for students. I advise that you NOT provide all instructions at once, but that you give instructions for each step in turn (your students may progress at differing rates, and those who need the most assistance will be overwhelmed if you give them the entire project at once)

 Students:

1. Read the Research Essay you have chosen for your Reverse Research project and hand in a one-page summary of its argument . Due: 1 month from start of classes. This portion may require multiple drafts, so hand in your summary well ahead of the final deadline.

2. Turn to the footnotes. On a separate sheet of paper, retype the footnotes [or the first 15, or selected numbers] and annotate each with this information:

a. what is the source? Is it a book, a journal article, an encyclopedia entry, an article from a popular magazine? See me with questions as you identify sources, or see our librarian, Rita Gobook, for assistance. However, neither us will help you until you have begun your work in earnest.

b. does The University of Mississippi library have this source? If it is an article, is the entire article available from one of our online data sources?

Due: 2 months from the start of classes.

3. Choose THREE sources from the footnotes you have identified and get the source in hand. Bring the source to me for verification.

Due: 3 months from the start of classes.

4. For each of your three sources go to the page that your Research Essay cites. Read enough of the preceding and following pages (or the entire source if you wish) to be able to tell how and why the author of your Research Essay used the source. For each of the sources, write a one-page explanation of why the source was used.

Due: 4 months from the start of classes.