Why a Prospectus is One of the Best Things Ever…Sort of

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve had research paper stuff on the brain.  Not only have I been working on my paper for The House on Mango Street, but I’ve also recently been revising my paper on monstrosity as it pertains to Batman’s female villains (which, I just found out, I’ll be presenting at the National Popular Culture Association Conference!).  

Today as I was working on my annotated bibliography and prospectus for my House on Mango Street paper, I realized two things: a) I am a complete English nerd because b) after I finished writing up my prospectus, I got really excited about writing the actual paper.

For those unfamiliar with having to write a prospectus, it’s basically a summary of what will be discussed in the research paper and is useful for mapping out the structure of the paper.  The information does not have to be exactly what will be in the final paper, but it should give you a good idea of where the paper is heading.  It typically includes the paper topic, a tentative title and thesis statement, and discusses the primary source and secondary sources being used to support the thesis.

While the idea of writing one of these seems tedious, I have found that it is actually much easier to write a research paper after having written a prospectus.  Why, you ask?  Not only does it help you formulate your paper ideas, articulating what will be used in the paper and how it will be structured, but typically, everything that goes into a prospectus will also be going into the paper’s introduction. 

Think about it: if a typical prospectus is about two double-spaced pages in length, and if the prospectus is basically the basis for your introduction, then when you go to write the paper, you will already have two pages of the paper written.  Furthermore, since the prospectus should map out how the rest of the paper is structured, you can just follow that structure to write the rest of the paper.

So, yeah.  If I didn’t already know that I was an English nerd, I definitely have proof now.  Then again, there are certainly worse things. J

Happy writing,

Shannon