Formatting/size/parts: The paper should be 8-10 pages double space, 12 pt, with

Formatting/size/parts: The paper should be 8-10 pages double space, 12 pt, with 1 inch margins using a normal size font. The paper should have a title with your name taking up minimal space on the first page – or you can have a separate title page not included in your page count. The paper should have a full bibliography covering all works cited in the paper.
Sources: The paper must include a minimum of ten sources; some primary sources and some secondary sources. I don’t count Wikipedia or other on-line history encyclopedia type websites as real sources. Please don’t use them!
Referencing: Footnotes or endnotes (not parenthetical referencing) are required. I take referencing very seriously in this paper. Aside from your introduction and conclusion, you should have a minimum of 3 references per page and hopefully more. I don’t care which style you use for notes and bibliography, but it should be internally consistent and one of the normal scholarly styles used.
It is also absolutely required that all papers have an argument that you spend the paper proving. In this paper you should pretend you are a lawyer making your case. Therefore, do not just describe how an event happened, instead say “This event happened because of these three reasons and not for the other possible five. I will proceed to prove it through A, B, and C evidence.”
(Many of these could be made more specific by focusing on one gender; a particular age group, a particular time period, and in some cases, a specific area.)
Grading: What am I looking for when grading the final paper?
1. Does it have a specific research question that it is trying to answer?
2. Does it have a thesis that covers the whole paper? If not, it’s already a B paper at best.
3. Do the arguments throughout the paper make a good case for the thesis? Do they seem to build on each other in a logical way?
4. Does it have excellent referencing and do a good job at proving what you’re arguing?
5. Does it keep the claims of the paper reasonable (i.e. small), based on the limited number of sources used in the paper? Does it NOT make huge overgeneralizations? (For example saying “Chinese people believe/think…” 1000s of years of history, continent sized country, billions of people – there is no one thing that describes them all.)
6. Is the organization of the paper, of sections, and of paragraphs coherent/make sense?
7. Does it have introductions and conclusions for the paper, for sections, and for each paragraph?
8. Does it have decent English with sentences that make sense? Does it have spelling errors or other easy to correct problems that show a lack of caring on the part of the author? Does it use slangy language and contractions which shouldn’t be in a formal paper? (This doesn’t mean that I appreciate very uptight language with overly fancy vocabulary either.) Has the author avoided repetition or fluff trying to make a small paper bigger?