PT5521 Week 4

Welcome to “Week 4” of Introduction to Theological Research and Writing! The lecture and reading for Week 4 will introduce the topics of book summaries, critiques, and avoiding plagiarism.

This week’s assignments:

1. Watch the lecture for week 4. Please do not make copies of lecture recordings.
2. Read Turabian pp. 81-83.
3. Read the book on your research topic.
4. Submit the books citation exercise using Part 1 of the citations template under the materials tab. Annotate 2 entries. Please download a copy of this document and do not update it in the LMS directly.

The class is designed to move us in small steps toward your final research paper. The first step in writing a research paper is, ironically, to begin with the bibliography, which is the last section of your paper. The reason is that you have to identify scholarly sources to read regarding your research topic. As you read sources on your research topic, write short summaries of them. You will not submit summaries to me directly, but they will help you eventually when you write your mid-term and final papers.

We will now turn to your citations exercise, which you will complete over the next three weeks. The citations exercise is designed to give you some practice writing citations for the various kinds of sources you identified for your research topic. In formatting your sources, follow the BTS Form and Style Guide first and the Turabian style guide second.

Most citations for sources have three parts: a reference number, a footnote, and a bibliography entry. For the books citation exercise, you have a template under the materials tab. Download this template and update it directly. On the title page, change only the words in red. Also, change the red font to black. On page 1, add reference numbers for the footnotes in the “Sample Paragraph” and then add corresponding footnotes for the books on that same page. These are the five books on your research topic that you identified last week. On the last page, add bibliography entries for the books. Annotate two of the bibliography entries. Submit Part 1 of the citations exercise as a Word document with Times New Roman, 12-point font. Please wait to submit parts 2 and 3 until you get my feedback on part 1, so that you can apply the feedback to the remaining parts of the exercise.

Notice that you should also read the required book associated with your research topic this week. Please email, if you have any questions.

Best wishes,

Dr. Pat Sanders