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ENG 111: College Composition I (Vogt-Loudoun)

This guide has been created by librarians at NOVA to help you find resources related to your assignment. Direct comments to Julie Combs, jcombs@nvcc.edu.

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For individual research help, schedule an appointment to meet with a librarian.

General Research Topic

Choose one of the three listed topics that sounds interesting to you but that you do not already have a strong opinion about. Do not choose a topic that you already know a lot about or have a strong opinion on, as that would make writing the objective report portion of your essay much more difficult.

  • What are the arguments for and against making two years of community college free for all students who are academically qualified and want it?
  • What are the arguments for and against allowing colleges to pay their athletes?
  • What are the arguments for and against 4-year colleges continuing to require the current standardized admission exams (SAT and ACT)?

Research: Using the research resources presented in class—the College library system including its databases and Google Scholar—locate enough sources to allow you to choose at least one high quality source on each side of the issue (two total) to describe for your group’s annotated bibliography and report on in your essay. You should read, or skim, at least four to six articles, videos, and other sources, and keep track of them with bookmarks and notes, in order to choose the ones that are most useful for your report.

Compose entries for two sources for your group’s Annotated Bibliography: Choose two sources to summarize for an annotated bibliography that your group will compile. You should choose sources that take different sides on the topic and that no other student in your group will be using for the bibliography (all group members may use all sources for the essay). Compose a written description of each source in which you describe its content, quality, and usefulness as shown in the template posted to the Module for this unit and to the group discussion board. Each group member will post their two bibliography entries to the group discussion board, and the group will compile the entries into a single annotated bibliography for all group members to download and use.

Essay writing: Each student will compose an individual essay of at least 4-6 pages (1200-1500 words) in which you present both sides on the question in an objective, fair, and unbiased fashion. Your essay will be in the form of a report using the information from your research to explain the arguments for and against the issue.

In composing your research report, you must use at least five high quality outside sources that may include newspaper, magazine, and scholarly articles, books, lectures, speeches, and video presentations. You may NOT use paid content from commercial webpages. You may use sources located by your group and included in the annotated bibliography, and you may also use additional sources you have located on your own.

For more information, please review the ENG 111 Researched Report document*.

*Due dates may be different depending on which section you are enrolled in.