Essay Instructions: This is for Media Studies: An introduction to mass communication. The sources used should be scholarly and I would like a couple of newspapers used as well. I would like the writers' strike of 1988 referred to in the paper and compare it, as well as the outcomes to the current Writers' Guild of America strike. If Lexis Nexis, Business and Company, or Business Source Premier searches are ideal. The following information is from the instructor regarding the paper:
Purposes
I have several objectives for this assignment:
To allow you to explore in more depth than is typically possible in a survey class a specific contemporary media-and-society or media-and-culture issue that is of interest to you.
To allow you to gain experience in academic research and writing.
To allow you to become acquainted with a small portion of the academic literature that relates in various ways to your topic.
To allow you to ask and begin to answer an original research question.
Paper overview
Although brief as research papers go, your paper will include all the elements found in most academic writing:
- introduction
- research question
- brief review of literature
- your own original analysis of the issue/texts/effects
- the conclusions and implications you draw as a result of reviewing both prior literature and new texts/issues: in other words, an answer to the research question that you posed
What should your paper be about?
The simplest answer is this: a contemporary issue or phenomenon or effect or controversy involving media and society (or media and culture) that you are strongly interested in.
During our class discussions, panels, and deprivation papers, you’ve all made clear to me that in various ways you are deeply and personally involved with media forms, media texts, media products, and/or the media industries. You spend time online, watching TV, listening to music, reading magazines/newspapers/books, being exposed to advertising, going to movies, listening to the radio, etc. In short, for better or worse, the media are clearly important parts of your own lives and the lives of the people you care about. Your paper should explore a topic that relates to one of your media interests.
How to turn your interest into a research paper topic
All academic research is guided by a “research question”—the issue, phrased in the form of a question, that you are investigating and hoping to (in at least some small way) answer. In other words, academic research does not simply involve compiling a pile of pre-existing facts about a topic—that’s what encyclopedias (and elementary school reports) do!
Rather, real academic research is much more narrowly focused and involves more creativity and originality. It is based on asking and attempting to answer a specific question—ideally, one that has never been asked or answered before—and, in doing so, generates new knowledge
While there are as many possible research paper topics and research questions as there are researchers, for the purposes of this assignment, it might be most helpful to think about your topic—and, therefore, structure your research question—in one of the following ways:
Investigation of a new/different phenomenon
Let’s say you’re intrigued by a new media technology, or a movie that’s significantly different from all others that have been produced, or the latest (“state of the art”) digital TV programs. You might phrase your research question as follows:
“How is [media issue/phenomenon X] new or different from what’s been available before”?
This, then, provides a framework for your own paper—it opens the door for a paper that includes (a) a brief review of the research about existing/old/traditional elements of your topic, and (b) a review of whatever research may exist about the new elements of your topic, and (c) your own original analysis.
Effects/impact/influence of a media phenomenon on society
Let’s say your interest is not so much in a technology or a program or a text in itself as much as it is in how one of those things is affecting people (as individuals, as a group within a culture, as an entire culture, as a society, as the world). Then your research question might be like one of these:
“What effects does X have on [group of people]?”
“How do [group of people] respond to X?”
“How do [group of people] feel about X?”
“In what ways are [group of people] incorporating X into their lives?”
“How is X changing the lives of [group of people]?”
“Why do [group of people] respond to X the way they do?”
“Why do [group of people] use X?”
A question/focus like one of these allows you to review what’s been studied about topics similar to yours as well as offer your own thoughts on what’s going on.
Controversies concerning a media/society issue
Another possibility is for you to explore neither a media text/phenomenon nor its effects, but rather the discussion or controversy that may be swirling around the text/phenomenon. In this case, your research question might be like one of these:
“What are the issues raised by X?”
“How do [group of people A] and [group of people B] differ in their reactions to X—and why?”
“Why is X controversial?”
What to do now
Start thinking about
- media-and-society issues that interest you
- the types of question(s) you might want to investigate that relate to your chosen issues
IF you have the time, motivation, and “know-how” to do so at this point, start doing database searches using Academic Search Premier (or other databases available through the library’s web site) to see what’s already been written about your topic.
Questions to ask
- How to do database searches
- What counts as academic research
- How to approach and write a literature review
- How to refine research questions
This memo concerns the technical aspects of writing academic papers: citations and references.
There are many formatting styles used in academic writing, including APA (American Psychological Association), MLA (Modern Language Association), Chicago, and others. The communication discipline favors APA style, which is also used by most scholars in the social sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc.) APA style guidelines dictate (among many other things) the following:
Formatting
12-point type, Times New Roman font, double-spacing, 1” margins on all sides, page numbers at in the upper right corner or centered at the bottom of the page.
In-text citations
When you’re referring to another scholar’s work, you do so NOT with footnotes or endnotes,[1] but rather by including the author’s last name and publication year in parentheses in the text itself. If you are quoting exact words, you also include the page number on which those words were found; if you are not quoting exact words, you don’t need the page number.
Since all in-text citations must include two or three pieces of information (name, year, and possibly page number), you have a number of options as to how/where you structure and place the citation within a sentence. Here are just a few of the many possibilities:
Smith (2004) found that movie violence has increased over the last decade.
Movie violence has increased over the last decade (Smith, 2004).
Movie violence has increased in recent years. As Smith (2004) reported, 50% of American films include gun fights or bloodshed.
While violence in movies appears to have increased recently (Smith, 2004; Thomas, 2003), audiences are less likely to consider violence a reason not to see a film, according to Brown (2002).
While some scholars (Smith, 2004; Williams, 1999) believe that movie violence is decreasing, others, such as Jones (2006), sharply disagree. As Jones argues, “the degree, the graphic nature, and the frequency of violence in 21st-century films are unprecedented” (2006, p. 101).
While some scholars (Smith, 2004; Williams, 1999) believe that movie violence is decreasing, others, such as Jones (2006), sharply disagree. “The degree, the graphic nature, and the frequency of violence in 21st-century films are unprecedented” (Jones, 2006, p. 101).
[NOTE: when mentioning several scholars/studies in the same parentheses, put the authors’ names in alphabetical order, not chronological order.]
References page
In APA-style writing, complete reference information is placed in a separate References page (or section) at the end of the document. At the top center of this page/section, write “References.”
Only include references in your References page if you had an in-text citation of the scholar’s name and year in the body of your paper. In other words, your References page does not include every article you read when researching your paper. It includes only those that you actually mentioned somewhere in your paper. Here are all the picky guidelines for formatting an APA-style References page.
Order: the References page lists all of your (mentioned!) sources in alphabetical order by lead author’s last name. If you have more than one source by the same author, list the older source first.
Authors’ names: authors are referred to only by last name and first initial (or first and middle initial if the author uses a middle name/initial), and in the same order in which the names appeared in the authors’ own article. (In all these examples, Smith is the “lead author.”)
- Smith, J.
- Smith, J., & Brown, A.
- Smith, J., Thomas, P., & Weiss, D.
Italics: The only elements of an APA reference that are italicized are journal titles and book titles. Article titles and chapter titles are not italicized.
Journal volumes/pages: If your source is an academic journal article, your reference will include the journal volume (which is also italicized) and the starting and ending pages of the article (which are not italicized). Here’s an example journal article reference:
Smith, J., & Jones, A. (2007). Recent increases in movie violence. Journal of Mass Communication and Society, 18, 332-341.
If your source is a non-academic journal (magazine or newspaper), you don’t include volume, but you do include the publication month/date—and you write “p.” or “pp.” in front of the page number(s):
Elliott, S. (2007, April 3). TV commercials using fewer “real” models. New York Times, p. A12.
Books and book chapters: If your source is a book all of whose contents are written by the same author, you format the reference as follows:
Brown, D. (2003). The Da Vinci code. New York: Doubleday.
If your source is a chapter in an edited collection, you format the reference as follows:
Weiss, D. (2005). Violence in 21st-century children’s movies. In D. Gross (Ed.), Trends in contemporary cinema (pp. 45-61). Berkeley: University of California Press.
I've attached an article written/formatted in APA style. Click on this link to see it.
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[1] In APA-style writing, footnotes are used very sparingly. Their only purpose is to provide commentary or additional information that would be disruptive to the flow of your writing if included in the main text. This note is itself an example!
