Developing Persuasive Proposals

Catalog description

Developing persuasive proposals is a skill required across many different fields and professions. Graduate students need to develop strong Capstone and dissertation proposals. Researchers inside and outside universities write proposals to compete for funding. And outside of academia, people working in the public and the private sectors leverage these skills in their professional lives, from convincing colleagues and supervisors that their ideas are sound, to developing business proposals to secure new clients and government proposals to forward new initiatives. In this graduate seminar, you will develop the skills to identify other groups of researchers, professionals, and members of the public who share your motivations for research, and to argue successfully how your proposed research relates to recent and foundational developments in your fields. We will identify and explore how different researchers make a persuasive case for their research goals and methodologies as they conduct original research in their fields. Students will learn how to develop research proposals that make a strong argument for the feasibility and importance of their research tailored to specific audiences, academic and professional. Throughout the class, we will also explore and practice writing conventions across the arts and sciences, both inside and outside the university, with emphasis on practicing the structure of argument; the use of evidence; voice and style in both traditional research writing and more innovative forms of writing; approaches to structuring interdisciplinary research; and documentation conventions. Students will develop an original project through assignments that build toward a formal research proposal (15-20 pages). The course serves as an ideal introduction to practicing the elements of research and writing for graduate and professional students early in their…