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Position Paper Instructions Over the course of the semester, you are to write five policy analysis papers. Four of these papers will be in the "Tuesday" topics, one position paper will be on your debate topic. [Note that you will be responsible for all five "Tuesday" topics on the exams]. At a minimum, the papers should involve an assessment of alternative positions, an evaluation of the evidence, and a well-defended conclusion. The paper should be approximately 500 words of the student's own work, not including the bibliography. [A nice time series chart on your topic counts as 100 word]. Format:
Note: your paper may, but need not, take an explicit position for or against the policy (and you need not take the same position you took in the debate). You must, however, address the best arguments on each side (or many sides) of the issue. If you take a position on one side of the issue, you should show why the arguments on the other side are wrong. A good paper:
FORMAT
Footnotes. Some people think that footnotes or citations are only used to indicate the source of a quotation. As a result, many things that should be footnoted are not and many things that should not be quoted are. Footnotes (or citations) should be used to: 1. Indicate the source of every direct quotation incorporated into the text (as a rule of thumb any string of six consecutive words needs to be quoted). 2. Indicate the authority for every important statistic or statement of fact which is not a matter of common knowledge (it is not plagiarism per se to neglect to cite the source of a statistic, but doing so lends credibility to the use of the data). 3. Acknowledge each conclusions, inferences, or frameworks drawn from another source. A citation is also necessary when a passage is paraphrased, or when its substantive meaning is borrowed, even in part When you paraphrase a passage, put it in your own words, changing just a few words in a quotation is wrong. Six consecutive words is sometimes used as a rule of thumb. 4. Discuss or amplify points which cannot be treated in the text without detracting from the central theme, that is, to make a comment that is "off on a tangent", but still an aspect of the overall subject, yet one that is removed from the main idea(s) of the particular paragraph or sentence. Do this rarely. There are three very common types of plagiarism: Deliberate plagiarisms will result in an F grade for the entire course and a referral to SCERB. Plagiarism which may be unintentional, (for example, uncited paraphrases of a paragraph or two) will result in either an F or 0 grade, depending on the severity of the offense, for the paper. Please note that I maintain a file of all previous semesters' papers. Quotations. Most student papers contain far too many quotations. A typical error is the disconnected quotation. A disconnected quotation occurs, for example, when "a sentence or paragraph is completed with an unnecessary quotation that sticks out like a sore thumb." This type of quotation diverts the reader's attention away from the text to the citation. If quotation is necessary, the original author usually deserves being mentioned in the text. On average, one or two quotations in an entire paper is sufficient. Quotations are best used when you want to describe the position or opinion of somebody important. Contrasting quotations from, for example, Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan on the issue of National Health Insurance would be far more effective than quotations from some obscure social scientists on the issue. By referring directly to the author in the text, you can also avoid a common and serious citation mistake--the ambiguous footnote. Ambiguous footnoting is an attempt to obscure the idea being footnoted. Often this involves the use of end-of-the-paragraph footnotes, leaving it unclear as to whether the last sentence or entire paragraph has been cited. Ambiguous footnoting is a form of plagiarism. Don't do it. Footnoting mechanics. Footnotes should be numbered consecutively. In the body of the text, numbers referring to the footnotes should be placed at the end of the phrase, sentence, or paragraph to which the note applies. The reference number should be raised above the level of type in the rest of the sentence. In Microsoft Word 2007, insert footnotes in the text with the menu
commands: The initial citation of a work should include the full name of the
author; complete title of the work; place of publication, name of the
publisher, and date; and a precise reference to the volume (if any), AND
THE PAGE NUMBERS of the source. If you are citing a passage from an
article, indicate the page numbers of the passage (not all the pages of
the article). The following represents the acceptable standard form: ENDNOTES \ FOOTNOTES NOTE: In the past, the purpose of underlining was to indicate text that
would be italicized, if you can do so easily, use bold-italics;
it looks a little better. When citing a book: 1 Bertram M. Gross, The Managing of Organizations (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1964), Vol. 1, p. 144.For Periodicals: 2 Robert A. Dahl, "The City in the Future of Democracy", American Political Science Review, 60 (December 1967), pp. 953-970.[For Newspapers:] 3 The New York Times, July 26, 1965, 1:1.[NOTE: The last item indicates page 1, column 1; the page should be indicated, but the column is not absolutely required.] For Government Documents: 4 U.S. Congress, Senate, Housing Act of 1958, Hearing before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Banking and Currency, U.S. Senate, 85th Congress, 2nd Session, on various Bills to Amend the Federal Housing Laws, May 14, 1958, p. 286.Footnoting "Shorthand:" [When a citation is made to the same work as in the citation immediately preceding, the abbreviation ibid. is used (from the Latin "ibidem", meaning "in the same place".] 5Peter Woll, American Bureaucracy (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1963), p. 103. 6Ibid., p. 157. [NOTE: It is necessary to give the full citation on a work (author, title, place of publication, publisher, date) only the first time the work is cited. Subsequent references which do not follow immediately can read as follows:] 7Woll, American Bureaucracy, p. 245. Citing Web pages: At a minimum, all citations should provide an author, a title of the document, the place a document can be found and a date (usually in that order). On any web page, these items may not be obvious. Note also, that there usually are no page numbers on web pages. Even if printing a web page does produce page numbers, the numbers are unique to each web browser's font configuration. Author: This should indicate the person who actually wrote the text of the document. This may be given near the top of the document; if there is no author listed there, there may be one indicated at the bottom (but this may be the person who created the web page and not the person who wrote the document). Title: This may be whatever is in bold on the top of the page or it may be the words that appear on the title bar of the entire Netscape screen. Include complete titles and subtitles. Note that sometimes clicking on a link in a web page document merely brings you to another place in the same document, in these cases, the title may be at the top of the previous screen. If the Document is part of a general collection, such as the Congressional Record, the Supreme Court Reporter, a web magazine, include the title of the document in quotes and underline the title of the general collection. Date: Provide one of these, if there is more than one, provide the date that is ranked first:
For papers submitted on-line, you can just include the URL as a
web link (below) 9Gary Klass, "Political Science 232, Politics and Public Policy: Syllabus" (Spring, 1995). There are other ways of citing sources, most often involving citing the authors' names in parentheses in the text (Woll 1963: p. 245). You can use one of these other citation methods for the assignments in this course, but only if a) you know exactly how to do it and b) the method provides a complete citation of author, titles, date, publisher, and page numbers. Improper or incomplete citation will result in a grade deduction and will cause the instructor to suspect that the paper was written by someone who has not read these instructions. Grading I will enforce stringent writing standards. Poorly researched and poorly organized papers will be returned to be rewritten. Papers with many spelling and grammatical errors will be severely penalized. Late papers will also receive automatic reductions in grade (specified on the syllabus) and will be graded without written comments. IN ORDER TO DO THESE PAPERS WELL YOU WILL HAVE TO GO THROUGH SEVERAL DRAFTS OF THE PAPER. Other Writing Tips. The best writing is done with a scissors. After you finish your first draft go back and cut out the first paragraph. Cross out any words that sentence can do without; any sentences that a paragraph is better off without. The most common grammatical error on student papers has been the incorrect use of the possessive case. The words its and it's seem to be the most troublesome. Pay attention to paragraph structure. Use topic sentences or transition sentences to begin each paragraph. Do not address new topics in the middle or at the end of a paragraph. Write in the active voice. Try to avoid using forms of the verb "to be" (e.g., is, was, were, have been). Bureaucrats often use the passive voice to avoid responsibility for bad decisions. Thus, a typical bureaucrat will write: "Your tuition has been increased $77 for the next semester," instead of: "I have decided to increase your tuition by $77." After you have finished your final draft, go "which-hunting": change almost every use of the word "which" to "that". Eliminate the word "being" whenever the sentence still makes sense without it. Every college student should have a copy of the small paperback book, The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E. B. White. Spend five minutes looking through it before you begin writing. Spell-checking is a marvelous invention, but it is a poor substitute for proof reading. Their many mistakes that they computer won't catch In the past, the purpose of underlining was to indicate text that
would be italicized, if you can do so easily, use bold-italics;
it looks a little better.
Gary Klass
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