HUM 223: Ethnic Music
Springfield College in Illinois
Fall Semester 2006

http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/humanities/hum223syllabus.html

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. -- Charlie 'Bird' Parker

Proposals for your term papers are due in class on _____________, ______________. They should be 500-750 words long or two to three pages printed in 12pt type. Since you may have written another kind of proposal in English composition classes -- i.e. one in which you "propose a solution to a problem" -- I am preparing this tip sheet for you with more detailed instructions. A research proposal is a simpler, more straightforward kind of writing. (It is also one that will make you money later on when you get into your careers and submit grant proposals to get projects funded.) Ours in HUM 223 will be very simple. In fact, you have probably written something very much like them in high school science lab workbooks.

What is a research proposal? It's simply a written document that tells what you're going to do, how you're going to do it and what you expect to learn. They can be elaborate, as you'll discover when you write them for your PhD dissertations or apply for federal grants. But all you need to do for me is to answer a few of the standard questions that come up in any research proposal:

• What is your topic, and what do you plan to say about it? What is your working hypothesis, in other words, and what support have you found so far to back it up? Give some background, and say why it is important to you, or to the study of the field. If I were writing about Willie Mae ("Big Mama") Thornton, for example, I would say she's mostly known now for singing the original verision of "Hound Dog," an early Elvis Presley hit. But I would go on to say she was a fine blues singer in her own right. I would probably also say she was typical of black rhythm-and-blues performers whose work was covered by white singers who struck it rich from the covers while the blacks made essentially nothing.
• How are you going to research the topic? What we need here is not a general statement like, "I'm going to get on the Internet and read some stuff and download a couple of MP3 files." Tell me specifically what you've found. For my "Big Mama" Thornton proposal, for example, I'd want to say she got that name because she stood 6 feet tall and weighed 350 pounds, and I'd quote the writer for online edition of The Handbook of Texas who said she only made $500 for her "Hound Dog" single, but "[h]er style captured the attention of many fans through the years because she was rough and beautiful and crazy yet controlled in her singing." And, of course, I'd list my sources, including recordings or sound files I planned to listen to. You'll need three to five for the HUM 223 proposal.

For your term paper in HUM 223, your proposal only needs to be 500-750 words (two to three pages in 12pt type) in length. There are more tips on how to draft proposals on the webpages linked below. One is for grad students in computer science at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the other is from Evanston Township High School. Both are clearly written and informative. Even though they tell you how to write proposals for projects that are much longer than our HUM 223 term papers, they can help you think through the steps for a short paper like ours.

1. Christopher, Thomas. "Elements of Scientific Papers and of Proposals." 1998. CS 540, Illinois Institute of Technology. 26 Oct. 2006. http://www.iit.edu/~tc/paper-elements.htm#Short%20course%20in%20proposal%20writing
2. Hayworth, Alan Lee. "Willie Mae Thornton." 2001. Handbook of Texas Online. 26 Oct. 2006. http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/TT/fthpg.html
3. "Research Proposal Format." n.d. Evanston Township High School. 26 Oct. 2006. http://facweb.eths.k12.il.us/chemphys/Word/Research%20Proposal.htm