how to buy the right car for you

Requirements: 3-4 pages with 3-4 sources This is a research paper. Papers without research will not pass.
 
Good News:   You will get to choose your own topic for this essay! Choose something that you are an expert in, or maybe choose something that you are curious about. For example, if you are about to buy a new car, maybe you could write about the best way to find a good one or how to haggle with sales people to get the right price.

Topic: 
 
This essay is a Process Analysis. You will instruct the reader about how to do something, how to overcome something, how to improve their life, or how to complete a process. Additionally, you must persuade the reader that your way is the best way for completing the process; you must consider strategies of persuasion.

Using personal examples to show how you do things and why can enrich the paper and make it more interesting.
 
Pretend you are a writer for a college magazine that all of the college will read: students, professors, deans, etc. Consider this audience while you are writing.
 
Requirements:
 

* 3-4 pages, more than 5 paragraphs. A page begins at the top of the paper and ends at the bottom. This is more than 2 1/2 pages and more than 2 3/4 pages. It is definitely and unequivocally a full three pages. 
Must be submitted professionally with the MLA format guidelines noted in the syllabus.
Use at least 3 sources. One must be from the GSU databases.
Must have correct in-text documentation. A works cited page is mandatory.
Cannot contain quotes over 2 full lines.
Cannot contain more than 6 quotes.
Must have at least two paraphrases.
* In this essay you may use 1st and 2nd person (you). In fact, using personal examples will make the paper more interesting.
Use an informative, interesting, and suggestive title for your essay.           (Do not underline or use quotation marks for your own title.)
Do not introduce your paper with a definition or with trite phrases such as “In our society today…” or the like. Write something new and interesting.

 
 
Notes on Sources

You may use one Personal Interview as a source. To document this, follow the guidelines in OWL which is linked to our course; type up a formal copy of the interview and cite it in MLA format. The person you interview must be credible; they must be some sort of expert in the field. 

When you use an interview in a paper, you won’t introduce it by saying you did an interview. You will introduce it the same may you did a source, with a signal phrase. You will have selected an expert, so simply use their name.

Book reviews, small blurbs, encyclopedias, or short how-to lists are not acceptable sources. Shmoop, CliffNotes, or any essay producing websites are not acceptable for ANY college assignment. You should expect to do a fair amount of reading in order to find interesting sources.
There are many reasons you might use source material: to provide historical or cultural background information, to define technical concepts or terms, to provide a contrasting point of view to your own, to provide statistics to support your claims, or to provide information from an authority to support your points.

 
What you will learn from this assignment:
 

To find and narrow down a topic for a research paper
To learn the research/discovery process
To discern reliable sources from unreliable sources
To learn critical thinking and that sometimes what you thought you knew is not what you knew at all and that you can change your mind
To use sources in your writing and to use proper citations not just for this class, but for every class in the future of your college career
To write even better than you do now

 
Sample Topics
You will choose your own topic, but here are some examples of what students have done before:
 
How to put together a strong garage band
How to select the best computer
How to stop smokingHow to invest your money