A proposal is a document that persuades the reader to take some action, such as funding research. The proposal should have a clear purpose and target a specific audience. This document outlines the parts of a proposal for a research paper assignment, including a purpose statement, audience analysis, tentative thesis, and level 1 outline. The purpose statement explains the goal, the audience analysis considers who will read it, the thesis previews the argument, and the outline maps the paper's structure at a high level. The proposal aims to convince the reader that the proposed research is worthwhile.

1. How to Write a Proposal

2. What is a proposal?
• A proposal is a genre of writing that is created to persuade a reader (who
may or may not have requested the proposal) to perform some sort of
action.
• In an academic environment, proposals are often asking a reader to consider
some research as valid and worth pursuing. This could be to encourage
travel to a conference, to provide funding for the research, or to be invited to
participate in a conference.

3. Purpose and Audience
• Everything that we write should have a defined purpose and a specific
audience.
• Purpose: What you hope to achieve with your writing.
• How might you approach a piece of writing if the purpose was to argue something?
What would the difference be if the purpose was to define something?
• Audience: The specific person(s) you are targeting with your writing.
• How might you approach a piece of writing to an informed audience? What would the
difference be if the audience was uninformed?

4. Research Paper
• Your proposal for this class will be proposing a specific avenue of research
for your research paper. In order to know what you need to do for your
proposal, you will need to know what the research paper is about!
• The assignment for your research paper, simplified, is:
• Compose a paper utilizing secondary research that argues, defines, or analyzes a specific
topic that you are intimately familiar with for an audience that is completely
uninformed regarding the topic.

5. Parts of our Proposal
• Each proposal may ask for different things. For our proposal, I’m asking for
a few specific things:
• A purpose statement,
• An audience analysis,
• A tentative thesis statement, and
• A tentative Level 1 outline.

6. The Purpose Statement
• The purpose statement should analyze what your purpose is and how you
hope to eventually achieve that purpose.

7. The Audience Analysis
• Especially for these academic proposals, your solution will often simply be
that research needs to be done in a specific area. Depending on your
discipline, this may mean completing your own study or just completing
secondary research into a specific subject.

8. The Tentative Thesis Statement
• This is simply a thesis statement for your paper. I call it “tentative” to
emphasize that you may very well have to change your thesis statement
before your final draft is due.

9. The Level 1 Outline
• A Level 1 outline is a very simple outline—it will consist of a very bare-
bones topic outline for your paper. For example:
• I. Introduction
• II. Topic 1 – [Brief Description of Topic]
• III. Topic 2 – [Brief Description of Topic]
• IV. Topic 3 – [Brief Description of Topic]
• V. Conclusion
• Again, this may (and probably will!) change before the end of the semester.