Over the next week and a half I am supposed to update my current outline. The problem is that to write a framework of a final product you have to know what you want the final project to look like. You have to know your audience, what style you are writing in, and what message you want to get across. Ideally you even know why you are writing in the first place.
I have vague understandings of all of these things but everything is fuzzy. My audience at this point is a group of three professors that will be grading my work. They will likely have backgrounds in sociology, philosophy, and critical theory. If I pretend that other people will be reading my work they will likely come to the piece with backgrounds in approximately those three fields. Since I have not been told otherwise, my style will be as colloquial as possible while still maintaining the respect and interest of my readers.
I am having some trouble with the flow of the paper. I do not intend to present an argument, agree or disagree with it, and then explain why. I am not planning on stating something that I have uncovered through research and then supporting my discovery with empirical data. I don’t even think that I’m going to do a literature review and then simply summarize my findings. What I hope to do is synthesize big general ideas that are accepted in the disciplines I have been studying and then give my opinions and ideas a chance to speak for themselves.
My final take-home surrounds the problems with the current political convention of shrouding political motives with scientific findings. I am writing because I think this is a big bad problem and I believe using a specific case study to illustrate this practice will clarify the issues that it raises.
So what to do to move forward: visualize the end goal to see what style to continue in.
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