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Writing a Prospectus
There
are many different kinds
of prospectuses for different purposes. In the humanities, Ph.D.
students are
asked to submit dissertation prospectuses to their committees; most
research
grant applications require them; academic job candidates often include
short
prospectuses with their application materials; and book publishers
request them
as part of the process of considering a manuscript for publication.
Editors of
journals and essay volumes may also request a prospectus of a proposed
article.
These different kinds of prospectuses differ mostly in regard to the
length and
detail with which the project is described. Dissertation prospectuses
can run
anywhere from 5 to 30 pages, depending on the amount of detail
requested of the
student, while grant and job applications generally require brevity
(1-2
single-spaced pages for a job application; 3-5 single-spaced pages for
many
grants). It is highly likely that before a major humanities project is
published, 3 or 4 different kinds of prospectuses will have been
written for
it.
A
prospectus should answer the following
questions:
- What is the subject of the study? How is the
subject defined (is there any special use of terminology or context)?
What are the main research questions the study aims to answer?
- Why is the author addressing this topic? What
have other scholars written about this subject, and how is this
author's approach, information, or perspective different? What need or
gap
does this proposed study fill in the scholarly conversation? What new
approach to a familiar topic does it propose to offer? What will be the
study's original and special contributions to this subject?
- What are the main sources that will be used to
explore this subject? Why are these sources appropriate?
- What is the proposed organization of the study?
- Does the author have any special needs in order
to complete this study? In particular, does s/he need funding to travel
to archives, gain access to collections, or acquire technical
equipment? Does s/he have the special skills (languages, technical
expertise) that this project might require?
Organization:
- Title: it should be informative and helpful in
pinpointing the topic and emphasis of your study
- The body of the prospectus: this section should
concentrate on addressing questions 1-3 above. The goal of this section
is both to describe the project and to "sell" the reader on its
potential interest and scholarly significance.
- A chapter breakdown: This can either be a
formal section, in which each chapter is described in turn in about a
paragraphâs worth of text, or it can be done more narratively, in which
the whole project is outlined as a more seamless story. Either way, it
should address question #4, above.
- (for grant applications, if applicable) a brief
paragraph at the end addressing question #5.
- (for dissertation prospectuses) a bibliography
is usually required.
- (for book prospectuses) a table of contents is
usually requested.
Some
further considerations:
Think about
your audience. Most of the
members of your dissertation committee will know a lot about your area
of research. But this may not be true, for example, of committee
members from outside the department. It is even less likely that
readers of job or grant applications or book editors will be familiar
with the particular area of scholarship in which you work. It is
therefore important that your prospectus convey its subject matter in
as clear a fashion as possible, and that it not make too many demands
upon its readers in regard to knowing specialized terminology or about
debates within a given field. Your prospectus should be meaningful and
interesting to an intelligent general reader.
What
readers look for in a good prospectus.
In most cases, prospectuses are being reviewed because people are
considering entrusting you with something: the freedom of advancing to
candidacy; a job; grant money; a book contract. They need to know if
their trust will be well placed, and that you are a good bet to follow
through on your proposed work. Questions that often arise in this
regard are as follows:
- How interesting and important is this
study?
(will we have helped make an important contribution if we support this
work?)
- Is the study feasible? Can it be done in
a
reasonable time frame?
- Can this author produce an excellent
dissertation/book? (nobody wants to back a shoddy effort)
Your
prospectus should address
the first of these concerns head-on and show the reader exactly why
your
project is important, interesting, and, if possible, relevant to broad
(human/social/political/cultural) concerns. The second two questions
are a
little tougher to address. Often, they emerge because the project
appears to be
too broad or ambitious in scope or not yet completely formulated. Or
perhaps
the readers have concerns about the author's scholarship. If you are
concerned
that your dissertation prospectus describes a project that appears too
big to
be successfully completed, you should discuss this with your
dissertation director;
this might be a signal that you need to reconsider your project's
structure.
As for the scholarship issue, you can best address this by making sure
to show
that you are completely in charge of the scholarly apparatus of your
project:
you know what you're talking about in regard to the scholarly debates,
and you
give sufficient (and the right) citations. (A negative example: if you
say
you're the first person to study a particular topic, you had better be
right!)
Dissertations
are works
in progress.
If you
have read these suggestions in preparation for writing a dissertation
prospectus, you may be feeling overwhelmed. Perhaps you worry that you
don't
know how to address all the issues raised in the five key questions
outlined
above. This is probably because your dissertation topic and/or
organization has
not been thoroughly worked out yet. Indeed, many students find it hard
to be
decisive about the shape, topic, and issues in a dissertation until
they are
well into the writing (which is why more advanced students tend to
write better
prospectuses than those just starting their research, and, not
coincidentally,
compete better for jobs and grants). If your dissertation is still in
its early
stages, you may have to bluff a little to produce a cogent prospectus,
and even
resign yourself to remaining a bit speculative in places about features
of your
project. But you should also see whatever difficulties you have in
writing your
prospectus as diagnostic of the work have yet to do in planning your
dissertation:
if you are having trouble articulating the topic, you probably need to
think it
through more thoroughly; if you are uncomfortable with your rationale
for
undertaking the project, perhaps you need to do more research on
previous
approaches; if you have trouble summarizing your chapters, perhaps you
need to
spend some time on either the organization of the dissertation or on
the
content of the individual chapters. This exercise is worth the effort:
a
dissertation prospectus will probably be the first draft of all the
other
prospectuses to follow.
Some other resources:
Przeworski
& Salomon, "On the Art of Writing Proposals"
Sydel
Silverman, "Writing Grant Proposals for Anthropological Research"
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