The essay will be 7-8 pages (typed and double-spaced in Times New Roman 12 point font) and
1750-2000 words in length (excluding title page, references, appendices, and bibliography). A
title page, a bibliography and Chicago Manual of Style footnotes or endnotes are all required
components of your paper.
Research and Sources
There isn’t a set requirement for the number of sources that need to be relied upon, but a good
rule of thumb would be aiming for at least half the page length (so in this case a minimum of 4
scholarly books or academic journal articles is quite reasonable). The quality or appropriateness
of materials is far more important than the quantity of sources referenced. It is also particularly
important that materials consulted and referenced are used appropriately and students are advised
to be very careful with using internet sites or even “official” documents from the internet
(whether they were obtained through crude internet browser searches or through other means) in
their research paper. Web retrieved materials vary considerably in quality and in sharing original
context or methodology and other parameters. Media sources (including journalistic ones) are
often not sophisticated enough to be worthwhile research materials for academic essays either.
Compounding such problems is the fact that increasingly illegitimate resources are being
produced by organizations with “an agenda”, and these materials are frequently being crafted in
such a way as to potentially resemble good materials or intentionally confuse people as to
whether legitimate sources are truly legitimate. For instance, a journal may be produced by an
anti-vaccination protest group or a statistical report will be detached from the information
regarding how it compiled its data or a pseudo-poll is provided as a counter perspective of a
rigorously designed one and the information that is being retained and shared generally
misinforms people by skewing much of the data. Even governments can directly produce or
point to such highly flawed data, for instance when a committee or task force is created to make
assessments, but it is not allowed the opportunity to look at all the appropriate measures. More
specifically this can be illustrated by considering that a hypothetical (or maybe a real) task force
is restrained from or given direction that it is not permitted to examine revenue generation along
with expenditure reduction options, or perhaps a committee shares data and indicates that certain
measures are speculative or an amalgamation, but it could either attempt to hide this explanation,
make it difficult to discover, or such important distinctions are hidden when this data get
uncovered by another source which then reproduces it or reframes it in a new source or
communication. Students are strongly encouraged to conduct the bulk of their research through
the MRU library interface, or similar research databases, which will significantly (though not
entirely) reduce the chance of your paper including such poor-quality resources.