------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: TERM PAPER PROPOSALS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ There were 3 kinds of term-paper proposals that I have received and/or handed back: 1. Acceptable: you should begin your research and writing. 2. Revise & resubmit: your proposal was vague and needs to be made more precise. Please revise and and resubmit no later than Mon., Mar. 1. Please feel free to talk to me, or email me, about how to make it better. 3. Unacceptable: your proposal was unacceptable in its current form. Please write a new proposal if you still want to do the optional term paper. The new proposal is due no later than Mon., Mar 1. Please feel free to talk to me, or email me, for advice on writing a better proposal. (These 3 categories, by the way, are the typical ones when you submit a paper to a journal.) In all cases, please attach your current proposal, with my comments on it, to the next version. If you did not write a proposal, you can change your mind and hand one in at any time (the sooner, the better). If you did write a proposal and, at the last minute, decide you don't want to write the paper after all, that's fine (there's no penalty): Just let me know. However: 1. All term papers must be approved by me in advance on the basis of a written proposal with at least some bibliographic references. Note that websites are NOT "bibliographic references" for this purpose. You should try to use only published documents (with certain exceptions that you can discuss with me). In particular, Wikipedia and dictionaries (on- or off-line) are NOT acceptable. Please use quotation marks when quoting someone else's words, and don't quote without giving a full citation to the source! 2. Such a proposal must be approved by me significantly before the date that the term paper is due. E.g., a proposal handed in, say, 2 weeks before the due date will NOT be approved. 3. If you want to write a term paper but can't get your act together in a reasonable amount of time, then you can opt for the final exam instead. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I understand that some of you are a bit puzzled about what to include in a term-paper proposal and, for that matter, how to write such a proposal so relatively early in the semester when you don't yet know what you want to write about. On the one hand, my advice in that case would be to decide on a topic that you do already know something about and wish to explore further. (After all, the point of a term paper is to give you the opportunity to further explore some topic you're interested in that we might not have time to cover, or to cover in depth, in lecture.) On the other hand, you could wait until the course is finished to decide what you want to write on, since, by that time, you will know what all the interesting issues are and will be in a better position than you are now to make a choice. Of course, that doesn't give you much time to do the research and writing! So, you need to compromise. If you're interested in writing a term paper, choose a topic that interests you *now*. If you know a little bit about it, you should be able to suggest some book(s) or article(s) that you plan to read. If you just know some topic vaguely (e.g., you may have heard that some guy named "Penrose" claims that minds can't be computers because of something having to do with Goedel's Theorem, but you don't know more than that) and you'd like to write on it, that's fine: I'll be happy to suggest a couple of things to read. Similarly, if you know that Penrose has written 2 or 3 books and several articles on the topic, and that there have been dozens, if not scores, of replies, I wouldn't suggest that you plan on reading all of them in the time remaining in the semester! If you do, I'll suggest how to cut that long list down to a more manageable one. If you have no idea what to write about at all, then I suggest not writing a term paper. The alternative is to just do the 5 position papers, and/or to do the final exam. I fully expect that I will approve about half of your proposals and send the other half back for revision, so don't worry about getting it "right" the first time. Email me, or post to UBLearns email, if you have questions.