GUIDELINES FOR DEVELOPING A PROPOSAL
The proposal has two purposes: to help you define and clarify your project for yourself and to communicate it clearly and convincingly to your Supervisory Committee. As they read your proposal, they need to understand what you plan to do, why it’s worth doing, how you are going to be able to do it, and how they might help you. You should assume this audience is sympathetic but also skeptical. They want to be on your side, but they want to be convinced that it’s a cause worthy of their time and effort. The most prevalent questions in their minds as they read are likely to be “why?” “how?” and “so what?” Try to anticipate these questions by providing explanations and rationales for your decisions wherever it seems needed.
The guidelines below are arranged in typical sequence, and if possible you should use the numbered headings to organize your proposal. Proposals are typically approximately pages plus a bibliography, all double spaced. Some are longer. An extensive, well-developed proposal is a good investment of time and effort, since it can form the foundation for the early pages of the thesis or project itself.
The guidelines below refer to Plan A theses but should be understood to apply equally to Plan B projects.
1) THESIS TOPIC
A thesis must obviously have a topic—it must be about something—and you should declare this at or near the beginning of your proposal. Beyond that, however, the thesis should identify and address a research problem. All scholarly research projects are driven by problems, which means that they are motivated by a scholar noticing something in his or her field that demands attention. For example, your research problem might take the form of a perceived knowledge gap: you find a subject where little work has been done, not much is known, or many questions remain.
Alternatively, the problem might be that you believe a much-discussed topic demands a critical reexamination in light of new theory or an overlooked perspective; or that a potentially useful connection to another field has not been made and should be explored. The problem could also take the form of a dilemma, puzzle, obstacle, or contradiction that the field needs to confront and resolve or overcome in order to move ahead.
Creative projects, too, may be seen as being driven by a problem--an idea that has not yet been explored in a particular genre, for instance.
In light of the preceding paragraph, the first section of your proposal might address the following headings and questions:
a) Context and research or creative problem
What will your thesis be about?
What will be the subject matter?
What problem will your thesis address?
Why is this problem important to your field? Why does it need to be addressed?
(In this opening section it may also be appropriate to explain how and why you chose this subject matter—what personal connection it has to you.)
b) Scope
What will be the scope or range of your thesis? What material will it include, and why? What material will it exclude, and why? What do you aim to accomplish in this project and what will you not be able to do? Where will you draw the line that marks the outer boundary of your project? (Think about the logic or principle that determines the scope of your thesis. For example, a project might be limited to a specific time period, to a particular geographical area, or to a defined genre of literature, or to a particular author or school of authors, or to a social group.)
c) Research or creative questions
At this point in your proposal it may help to state your research or creative questions. These questions will motivate and guide your work, and your whole thesis will ultimately be your attempt to answer these questions. (A specific “thesis statement” is simply an answer to a research question, but the best thesis statements are the result of asking the right research questions.)
You might be able to boil down your thesis project to one main question, followed by several subsidiary questions that elaborate and explicate the main question. Alternatively, your thesis might be driven by several distinct but related questions that address different parts of the problem or attack it from different angles. Again, each of these questions might need some follow-up questions to make the question clear. Since these questions are the core of your thesis project, it’s worth spending some time considering how many you need to ask, how they relate to each other (e.g. in parallel or in series), and how best to word them.
Identifying and phrasing your research or creative questions will help you bring the project into focus before you embark on it, and while you are working on it you may find it helpful to keep returning to your questions periodically. Reconsidering them from time to time can help renew your motivation and to keep you on track. Revise the questions as necessary to reflect any evolution or refinement of your purpose in the project.
In the opening paragraphs of your thesis proposal, where you describe and explain your topic, the problem, its significance, and the scope of your thesis project, you are establishing a context for your questions. This context should help your readers anticipate your questions, so that when they read them they will readily understand what the questions mean and why you are asking them. In this section, and elsewhere in the proposal, you may need to define key terms for your readers, especially if you are using them in specific or unusual ways. Misunderstandings occur when readers recognize terms but don’t recognize the particular ways they are being used.
2) LITERATURE REVIEW
Like most scholarly journal articles, a thesis proposal should contain a section where you review relevant literature, summarizing and discussing the work of other scholars or writers. Doing so accomplishes several purposes:
It allows you to show how near or far the field has already come to answering your research questions (which may have been the subject of years of discussion by others).
It helps provide a context in which to locate your project, showing the existence of a scholarly or creative conversation in which you are about to participate.
It provides evidence that the subject is important enough to your field to have generated discussion .
It establishes your authority to enter the conversation, showing that you are up to speed with the discussion and would be a credible participant.
It allows you to shape the conversation, giving your own reading of what has been written so far about the topic.
This last point indicates the need to think about how you will organize the literature review. Can you divide the literature into groups, each representing a similar perspective on the topic? What would be the best sequence in which to present the works of other scholars? What organizing principle might you follow? How can you communicate your reading of the scholarly discussion by adding forecasting statements, transitions, and summaries?
You don’t want to distort or misrepresent the work of others unfairly to make your own look better, but your thesis proposal is an argument for a particular perspective on the subject matter, and the literature review should play an important part of the support for that argument. A good review of literature will not only represent other writers’ work in ways they would find reasonable and acceptable but will also interpret and evaluate that work according to your own point of view. As much as you are able to at this point, identify which writers will be your most important sources, explain why, and explain how you plan to use their work to inform yours. At the end of your literature review, it might be useful to revisit your research questions, reminding your readers how your project will extend the discussion you have just reviewed.
Shaping your literature review into a well-structured argument with the characteristics outlined above will help you avoid the tendency of literature reviews to be tedious, plodding summaries, devoid of any opinion or point—the kind of prose that a reader feels tempted to skip. A well-written review of literature should be compelling reading.
3) PROCEDURES
a) Research and analysis
This section of your proposal explains how you will go about your work. If you are doing primary research, what methods of gathering data will you use, and why? If you are doing secondary research, what else will you read besides what you have discussed in your literature review, and how do you plan to analyze your material? If you are doing creative work, it may involve considerable research and analysis too, before the main work of writing begins.
This section might be the best place for you to explain what theory will guide your work and why. It is also the place to mention your experience as a researcher and writer. How has your prior work prepared you to do this project? If your project will involve learning new methods, how will you acquire that expertise? What sources of help are available to you?
At this point in the proposal you should also explain whether or not your research will require Institutional Review Board (IRB) clearance. The IRB ensures that primary research does not endanger or compromise the privacy of human subjects. (If you plan to do folklore fieldwork, see one of the folklore faculty members before approaching the IRB.)
b) Outline
What form will your thesis take when it is finished? For instance, will it follow a traditional thesis structure with chapters? Will it involve forms of creative writing? Multiple genres? Extensive appendices? Electronic or audiovisual media? Provide a tentative outline of your thesis, with chapter headings and a few lines of explanation under each. As in the literature review, it may help readers if you include forecasts and transitions to help explain the rationale for your organization of the thesis. Your readers will want to know why you have divided it this way and why you have chosen this sequence for the sections. Help them see and understand the logic of your organization.
c) Timetable
Problems occur in thesis defenses most often when committee members have not had time to read the thesis, to make suggestions, and to see those suggestions incorporated in a revised version that they have time to read before the defense. Your proposal should include a schedule that you plan to follow for completing the research and writing the thesis. Bearing in mind the Graduate School’s deadlines and your own plans for graduation, identify a tentative defense date and work backwards from that. Make sure your timetable meets the deadlines listed below:
Submit first complete draft to committee members at least 4 weeks before defense.
Draft should be returned to you with comments at least 3 weeks before defense.
Schedule defense date with Grad School at least 2 weeks before defense.
Resubmit revised draft to committee at least 10 days before defense.
You may conclude this section by identifying the first or next step you plan to take in your project.
4) BIBLIOGRAPHY
The bibliography at the end of your proposal should be a list of works you have cited in your proposal. Your committee may also ask for a separate list of works you have consulted (but not cited in the proposal) and works you are planning to consult. Follow the citation style favored in your field—e.g. MLA, APA, Chicago, Turabian, etc. You should also buy the Publication Guide for Graduate Students at USU from the Bookstore, or download it from the Graduate School website.
For more on proposals, see the essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education ( http://chronicle.com/article/Demystifying-the-Dissertation/128916/)
The proposal has two purposes: to help you define and clarify your project for yourself and to communicate it clearly and convincingly to your Supervisory Committee. As they read your proposal, they need to understand what you plan to do, why it’s worth doing, how you are going to be able to do it, and how they might help you. You should assume this audience is sympathetic but also skeptical. They want to be on your side, but they want to be convinced that it’s a cause worthy of their time and effort. The most prevalent questions in their minds as they read are likely to be “why?” “how?” and “so what?” Try to anticipate these questions by providing explanations and rationales for your decisions wherever it seems needed.
The guidelines below are arranged in typical sequence, and if possible you should use the numbered headings to organize your proposal. Proposals are typically approximately pages plus a bibliography, all double spaced. Some are longer. An extensive, well-developed proposal is a good investment of time and effort, since it can form the foundation for the early pages of the thesis or project itself.
The guidelines below refer to Plan A theses but should be understood to apply equally to Plan B projects.
1) THESIS TOPIC
A thesis must obviously have a topic—it must be about something—and you should declare this at or near the beginning of your proposal. Beyond that, however, the thesis should identify and address a research problem. All scholarly research projects are driven by problems, which means that they are motivated by a scholar noticing something in his or her field that demands attention. For example, your research problem might take the form of a perceived knowledge gap: you find a subject where little work has been done, not much is known, or many questions remain.
Alternatively, the problem might be that you believe a much-discussed topic demands a critical reexamination in light of new theory or an overlooked perspective; or that a potentially useful connection to another field has not been made and should be explored. The problem could also take the form of a dilemma, puzzle, obstacle, or contradiction that the field needs to confront and resolve or overcome in order to move ahead.
Creative projects, too, may be seen as being driven by a problem--an idea that has not yet been explored in a particular genre, for instance.
In light of the preceding paragraph, the first section of your proposal might address the following headings and questions:
a) Context and research or creative problem
What will your thesis be about?
What will be the subject matter?
What problem will your thesis address?
Why is this problem important to your field? Why does it need to be addressed?
(In this opening section it may also be appropriate to explain how and why you chose this subject matter—what personal connection it has to you.)
b) Scope
What will be the scope or range of your thesis? What material will it include, and why? What material will it exclude, and why? What do you aim to accomplish in this project and what will you not be able to do? Where will you draw the line that marks the outer boundary of your project? (Think about the logic or principle that determines the scope of your thesis. For example, a project might be limited to a specific time period, to a particular geographical area, or to a defined genre of literature, or to a particular author or school of authors, or to a social group.)
c) Research or creative questions
At this point in your proposal it may help to state your research or creative questions. These questions will motivate and guide your work, and your whole thesis will ultimately be your attempt to answer these questions. (A specific “thesis statement” is simply an answer to a research question, but the best thesis statements are the result of asking the right research questions.)
You might be able to boil down your thesis project to one main question, followed by several subsidiary questions that elaborate and explicate the main question. Alternatively, your thesis might be driven by several distinct but related questions that address different parts of the problem or attack it from different angles. Again, each of these questions might need some follow-up questions to make the question clear. Since these questions are the core of your thesis project, it’s worth spending some time considering how many you need to ask, how they relate to each other (e.g. in parallel or in series), and how best to word them.
Identifying and phrasing your research or creative questions will help you bring the project into focus before you embark on it, and while you are working on it you may find it helpful to keep returning to your questions periodically. Reconsidering them from time to time can help renew your motivation and to keep you on track. Revise the questions as necessary to reflect any evolution or refinement of your purpose in the project.
In the opening paragraphs of your thesis proposal, where you describe and explain your topic, the problem, its significance, and the scope of your thesis project, you are establishing a context for your questions. This context should help your readers anticipate your questions, so that when they read them they will readily understand what the questions mean and why you are asking them. In this section, and elsewhere in the proposal, you may need to define key terms for your readers, especially if you are using them in specific or unusual ways. Misunderstandings occur when readers recognize terms but don’t recognize the particular ways they are being used.
2) LITERATURE REVIEW
Like most scholarly journal articles, a thesis proposal should contain a section where you review relevant literature, summarizing and discussing the work of other scholars or writers. Doing so accomplishes several purposes:
It allows you to show how near or far the field has already come to answering your research questions (which may have been the subject of years of discussion by others).
It helps provide a context in which to locate your project, showing the existence of a scholarly or creative conversation in which you are about to participate.
It provides evidence that the subject is important enough to your field to have generated discussion .
It establishes your authority to enter the conversation, showing that you are up to speed with the discussion and would be a credible participant.
It allows you to shape the conversation, giving your own reading of what has been written so far about the topic.
This last point indicates the need to think about how you will organize the literature review. Can you divide the literature into groups, each representing a similar perspective on the topic? What would be the best sequence in which to present the works of other scholars? What organizing principle might you follow? How can you communicate your reading of the scholarly discussion by adding forecasting statements, transitions, and summaries?
You don’t want to distort or misrepresent the work of others unfairly to make your own look better, but your thesis proposal is an argument for a particular perspective on the subject matter, and the literature review should play an important part of the support for that argument. A good review of literature will not only represent other writers’ work in ways they would find reasonable and acceptable but will also interpret and evaluate that work according to your own point of view. As much as you are able to at this point, identify which writers will be your most important sources, explain why, and explain how you plan to use their work to inform yours. At the end of your literature review, it might be useful to revisit your research questions, reminding your readers how your project will extend the discussion you have just reviewed.
Shaping your literature review into a well-structured argument with the characteristics outlined above will help you avoid the tendency of literature reviews to be tedious, plodding summaries, devoid of any opinion or point—the kind of prose that a reader feels tempted to skip. A well-written review of literature should be compelling reading.
3) PROCEDURES
a) Research and analysis
This section of your proposal explains how you will go about your work. If you are doing primary research, what methods of gathering data will you use, and why? If you are doing secondary research, what else will you read besides what you have discussed in your literature review, and how do you plan to analyze your material? If you are doing creative work, it may involve considerable research and analysis too, before the main work of writing begins.
This section might be the best place for you to explain what theory will guide your work and why. It is also the place to mention your experience as a researcher and writer. How has your prior work prepared you to do this project? If your project will involve learning new methods, how will you acquire that expertise? What sources of help are available to you?
At this point in the proposal you should also explain whether or not your research will require Institutional Review Board (IRB) clearance. The IRB ensures that primary research does not endanger or compromise the privacy of human subjects. (If you plan to do folklore fieldwork, see one of the folklore faculty members before approaching the IRB.)
b) Outline
What form will your thesis take when it is finished? For instance, will it follow a traditional thesis structure with chapters? Will it involve forms of creative writing? Multiple genres? Extensive appendices? Electronic or audiovisual media? Provide a tentative outline of your thesis, with chapter headings and a few lines of explanation under each. As in the literature review, it may help readers if you include forecasts and transitions to help explain the rationale for your organization of the thesis. Your readers will want to know why you have divided it this way and why you have chosen this sequence for the sections. Help them see and understand the logic of your organization.
c) Timetable
Problems occur in thesis defenses most often when committee members have not had time to read the thesis, to make suggestions, and to see those suggestions incorporated in a revised version that they have time to read before the defense. Your proposal should include a schedule that you plan to follow for completing the research and writing the thesis. Bearing in mind the Graduate School’s deadlines and your own plans for graduation, identify a tentative defense date and work backwards from that. Make sure your timetable meets the deadlines listed below:
Submit first complete draft to committee members at least 4 weeks before defense.
Draft should be returned to you with comments at least 3 weeks before defense.
Schedule defense date with Grad School at least 2 weeks before defense.
Resubmit revised draft to committee at least 10 days before defense.
You may conclude this section by identifying the first or next step you plan to take in your project.
4) BIBLIOGRAPHY
The bibliography at the end of your proposal should be a list of works you have cited in your proposal. Your committee may also ask for a separate list of works you have consulted (but not cited in the proposal) and works you are planning to consult. Follow the citation style favored in your field—e.g. MLA, APA, Chicago, Turabian, etc. You should also buy the Publication Guide for Graduate Students at USU from the Bookstore, or download it from the Graduate School website.
For more on proposals, see the essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education ( http://chronicle.com/article/Demystifying-the-Dissertation/128916/)
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