Essay Topics

Preflight Checklist for All Written Work

Electronic drafts (.doc, .docx, .rtf, .pdf, Apple pages only). Other formats will be returned to you if I cannot convert them.
Have a clever title that sums up the focus (not the governing claim/thesis) of the essay. Get more advice on titles at the grading rubric.
If you are far under or far over the word count, let's chat and not at the last moment.
Instead of a title page, just put the project's title and your name up top of what I call a "Bias Statement" of no more than one paragraph that does not count toward your word-count. This is a reflective piece in which you state your personal bias about the topic (the trust worthiness of your source(s), the subject, the way your personal experience might influence the paper). This is key, because bias is the death of good academic writing. By typing it, you can see what you have to fight against. It gives me and your Writing Consultant ways to help you combat bias.
A sample bias statement by me would be: "I've a mania about human space travel. I felt emotionally wounded when Richard Nixon killed the last Apollo landings and Congress cut NASA funding. In the rather dark 1970s, NASA became the butt of jokes, and I hated it. So I have to write against that bias when I do this project; the agency was not perfect, and there exist compelling reasons not to spend so much money on human-crewed missions."
Skip the summary! I want close analysis and support for your ideas. My and the Consultants' tips are here and here.
Know my Pet Peeves. It amazes me how many students do not study this resource. See the grading rubric for policies regarding them.
Plagiarism: You must cite all sources, and that means paraphrases of others' ideas as well as direct quotations. I will give any work containing plagiarism a zero and will consider consulting Honor Council. All work will be run past a plagiarism check.
Run through the work with a buddy from class. I put together a worksheet for this. Use it. What would John Glenn do?

4 Exploration Missions (20% of final grade)

Analysis Essay (20% of final grade)

We will we doing work with both the film and book versions of First Man. At least 1000 words.

Pick one scene from the film (that is, a series of linked shots at the same time and place) and analyze how the film portrays Armstrong in a manner different from Hansen's version of the First Man. Your governing claim (thesis) in the introduction should focus on how this scene changes the entire way we see Armstrong and why that is so important.

To do this well, you should perform close-reading analysis of the language in both works and imagery, in the film.

Use film time-codes from the streaming film, like this: Directors of films get treated like authors of books, and the time-code appears as hour:minute:second. You'll lose points if you don't have the time codes reasonably close.

Example of how to incorporate a page reference and time code (I've invented them just for this example). Note too how the writer follows up a claim with linked analysis, rather than rushing off to the next claim as though checking off a grocery list:

"We see Neil rebuff his soon-to-die friend Ed White here (Chazelle 1:26:15), whereas Hansen does not emphasize this moment in any detail when discussing Elliot See's memorial service (143). This short scene makes Armstrong's pain deeper than what we see in the book, whenever one of Neil's comrades dies. . ."

Dr. Outka's page at Writer's Web provides a really strong example of what I want. You will also want to review my and student Pattie Fagan's advice about finding and employing "telling details" to support an argument.

Mid-Term Essay (20% of final grade)

I will give you an essay topic here, and it will be due Monday by 9am. 750 words. Your Consultant will not be available to help with this, but you can meet with classmates to review each other's work and read it aloud (in particular) to avoid small errors.

Research Proposal (30% of final grade)

You'll find Dr. Whitehead's research guide for us here.
Come up with a research question (topic of your choice) based upon the "big question" you have been honing all semester, and then write a rationale of at least 1000 words.
The rationale states why the question would be worth exploring for a full length essay and how and why you might use the resources in your bibliography to explore the question, were you to write up an essay you'd present, say, at the A&S Symposium in the Spring semester. You may wish to use the Arts & Sciences research proposal format as a guide for this. Some of it will not apply to your project (expenses, quantitative results) but the idea of Aims-Significance-Plan may greatly demystify the process. You may soon be writing one of these for real, if you plan to work in a faculty lab.
One important aspect of the proposal will be what you still need to learn about the topic and which questions are going to be hardest to answer (and why). From a student's perspective, what would your essay add to the conversation about, say, the nature of a Mars colony, how NASA sugar-coated the family lives of astronauts, JFK's reasons for the Man-Moon-Decade plan, or the personality of an ideal astronaut?
Hint: the best research questions are the ones that remain puzzling for a long time. Go back through your exploration missions and in-class work to see what still "bugs you."Including at least ten sources, one of which must be book length and none of which would have been assigned in this class.
Wikipedia is not permissible as a source and you may only use it personally for background information. Repeat, it does not count as a source. Beyond the ten required, you can include our own readings or films. That said, each source must be annotated (at least two sentences and no more than 100 words per annotation) using the guidelines at this Writer's Web page.
Please use MLA format for all sources, please. Errors will cost a few points.
You do not need a separate works-cited list (as Alex's example has below). Your annotated bibliography serves that purpose.

Sources I have used with this class before or have discovered since then:

Alex Kohnert's Proposal from my 2016 section. Alex gave permission to share this, and though it's a bit shorter than the ones we are doing this year it shows careful planning and focus.
Robbie Kent's Proposal from my 2016 section. Robbie gave permission to share this, and it's a good look at some of the ideas explored in Angle of Attack. He also went beyond their 500-word minimum for the rationale to something more akin to what you folks are doing now. His tone is critical to how you write your projects. There are lots of moments where Robbie will write "the evidence suggests" or similar, the mark of a saying why his question is worth further study, instead of giving the reader a definitive answer.
Clouds Over Cuba: Multimedia site about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cold-War tensions, and a chilling "might have been" short film.
Chaikin, A. A Man on the Moon. Definitive but not academic, at one time the best available overview of Project Apollo. UR has a copy.
Harford, J. Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon. If you wish to consult this one, request it via Interlibrary Loan.
Hollingham, R. "The Switch that Saved a Moon Mission from Disaster." at the BBC.
Jacobsen, A. Operation Paperclip. A non-academic but comprehensive history of bringing Nazi scientists to the US in the 1940s and early 1950s. UR has a copy.
Kimball, W. Man in Space. Disney's influential series with pioneers like von Braun (that laugh-a-minute Prussian scientist!). In the film, available at YouTube for the moment (and it may be brief) has von Braun appearing to discuss his Destination-Moon-style rocket about 34 minutes in.
Launius, R. Reaching for the Moon: A Short History of the Space Race. UR has an e-book, by a Smithsonian associate curator. Should be a trustworthy source for the Sputnik-Apollo era.
Neufeld, M. von Braun. The definitive academic biography of our most famous German rocket-scientist. If you wish to consult this one, request it via Interlibrary Loan.