The House of Broken Angels

Research paper about The House of Broken Angels in which YOU DECIDE THE THESIS OF THE PAPER! The thesis statement must be focused on only one idea. The paper should not be solely about the characters though you can talk about them, of course. I MEAN THIS! In other words, do not do extensive analyses or comparisons of characters. (You have been doing this kind of thing in English classes whenever you took them.) You can write about other literary devices, if you’d like, such as style, symbols, tone, and/or point of view. This is largely a literary paper, not a paper about Mexicans, Mexican Americans, or other “general” topics related to the novel.

This paper is NOT A REPORT. Instead, it is an argument that textually analyzes the novel. Your own voice will be uppermost in the paper (~ 65 % of it), and the ideas of your sources will be interweaved throughout the paper and support your claims. You will not simply copy and paste parts of your sources into the paper and it an artificial comment here and there.

Your paper will have an introduction (that could be more than one paragraph) THAT ENDS WITH YOUR THESIS STATEMENT, a body, and a conclusion. Make sure to develop each paragraph, including those in the introduction (if you have more than one paragraph there) and conclusion (if you have more than one paragraph there). The topic sentence of each paragraph should begin the paragraph and “cover” all that fits below in the unified, coherent paragraph. Do not overuse transition words within the paragraph, but you can use them there sparingly. Make sure that the first sentence of each paragraph flows smoothly from the paragraph before it, so check that you use transitions in that sentence. DO NOT END A PARAGRAPH WITH THE TOPIC OF THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH.

Make sure that you have at least 5 sentences in each paragraph to ensure that you have developed your ideas enough in that paragraph.

You must use 8 secondary sources, at least 3 of which should come from scholarly journals. (All of the sources can be scholarly journal articles if you’d like.) You can use magazine and newspaper articles, too, if you so desire. You can use, among others, the JSTOR and MLA International Bibliography found under “Mugar Library” and “databases” when you are on the B.U. library site: bu.edu/library. (You can also use Google Scholar if you’d like.) If you have any problems or concerns about finding sources, please email me or see me after class. Wikipedia and websites should not be your sources though you may start researching by looking at what is written in Wikipedia. You can also find sources by looking up items listed in bibliographies of the articles you come across.

You should incorporate ideas from ALL of the sources into your paper. This means that you should quote at least once from each source. You can paraphrase from the sources, too. Make sure that you discuss the idea from the source thoroughly; do not simply throw into your paper a quotation or paraphrase without inserting it as part of a “quotation/paraphrase sandwich.” It is also very important that you do not forget to cite your sources by putting the author’s name and page number of the source in parenthesis (when appropriate) at the end of the sentence that you quote or paraphrase. You would cite differently if you were using the APA documentation style, but you are not using this. You are using the MLA format. I expect that you will use this style correctly.

The outline, thesis statement (put it at the top of the paper) and links to your sources. You can simply write 10 or so concrete and specific sentences below the thesis with the ideas that you plan to discuss in the paper.