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Daniel Kies Department of English College of DuPage |
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| Composition 2 English 1102 |
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An Example of a Research Proposal
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Years ago, I did the same writing assignment that I am asking you to do this semester: I wrote a ten page, researched, documented, argumentative paper about George Orwell's 1984. Different versions of that paper were published in The Revised Orwell and Advances in Systemic Linguistics.
Origins of my Paper
Two years before beginning to write 1984, Orwell published a famous essay on how clarity of writing and clear thinking were intertwined. In "Politics and the English Language," Orwell examines several ways that muddy thinking leads to muddied writing and vice versa. He concludes by emphasizing the role of clear writing in public discourse, such as political discourse, and how (too) often people are deceived and manipulated by discourse that is designed to hide, rather than reveal, truth. Orwell concludes his essay with six rules for clear writing, including "iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active."
However, as I began to read 1984, I immediately noticed that Orwell breaks his own rule about passive voice consistently and constantly throughout the novel. This apparent contradiction between Orwell's writing style in 1984 and his own rules for good writing, published only two years earlier, became the source of my research interest in my paper.
How to Write a Proposal
Proposals often have a "movement" within them, from a very general range of ideas to a much more specific, single research idea at the end. The idea is to provide some (general) background ideas at the beginning — ideas that will establish the context for the specific research topic later. Notice, for instance, that in the first sentence of the example below, I mention the wide range of ideas that are relevant to the study of the novel, sociological, political, cultural, historical, literary, and linguistic. In the second sentence, I pick up on only one of those ideas, linguistic criticism, and I begin to narrow my research area.
The third and fourth sentences further narrow the scope of linguistic criticism to just Orwell's literary language. In the second paragraph, I present my research topic, having narrowed the scope my subject and given enough background information. My proposal ends by my mentioning the two interrelated objectives of my research. Often proposals use questions as a way to frame the research topic. For example, I could have written my research idea in the form of a question as well: Why did Orwell use a writing style in the novel that seemed to contradict his own ideas about clear writing and good style?
My Paper Proposal as an Example
Below are the working title and text of my original paper proposal.
Orwell's Use of Agency in 1984
The critical response to George Orwell's 1984 covers an enormous span of issues: sociological, political, cultural, historical, literary, and linguistic. The linguistic criticism of 1984 has focuses primarily on Newspeak as a language and on Orwell's ideas about the relationship between language and thought. Literary and linguistic critics of 1984 have largely ignored, however, Orwell's literary language, i.e., the language Orwell uses in writing 1984. Indeed, the few critical remarks about Orwell's writing style and use of language have generally been negative — attributing the dull, monotonous, dry writing style to Orwell's career as a journalist.
I believe that those critical responses to Orwell's writing style are wrong-headed. Orwell was keenly sensitive to writing style and to the emotive and persuasive power of language, as can be seen in his essays — particularly "Politics and the English Language." In my research paper, I want to show (1) that Orwell's writing style was a carefully constructed complex of various linguistic features of English and (2) that his writing style contributes importantly to the underlying themes in the novel.
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