This paper should:
Include a title and abstract (roughly 150 words, summarizing the main ideas of your paper)
Be 3,500 to 4,000 words, not including the title page/abstract or references. This is about 10-12 pages, double spaced.
Include the important sections of a research paper:
An introduction (about 1 or 1.5 pages that gives us your main ideas/argument and “plan” for the paper)
Literature review/background context
Methodology (what you did and why/how)
Research findings
Discussion (what does this all tell us?)
Conclusions (final summary and next steps/recommendations)
Have in-text citations and a corresponding reference list. Use APA styleLinks to an external site. but don’t worry about being perfect; what is most important is that outside information is cited. You can also see sample student papers at Righting Wrongs and follow their style.
If you include any photos or graphics from outside sources, make sure to cite them. If they are photos you took or graphics you created using your own data, you do not need a citation. (If you create a graphic using someone else’s data, cite the data source.)
You are writing a traditional research paper and not a content analysis essay. You can use a range of sources to write your “background” section (which tells us the basics about the issue and/or conflict you’re looking at), but you need a sample of artifacts to analyze to see how this issue is being represented/told/shared/framed. That could be a sampling of newspaper photographs, for example, or looking at the language used in media reports. I shared a video about this a while back, and you can also find a recommended paper outline here. If you’re still not sure and/or have questions, please message me so we can sort it out.
And also (to make you aware, not because I don’t trust you): This paper will be scanned by anti-plagiarism and anti-AI software, so please use your own words (no cutting-and-pasting) and don’t use AI like ChatGPT.