Talia
October 5, 2009 — Lee QuinbyTalia,
Your first sentence follows the “I propose” model that I recommend (below in the earlier post). Make it even clearer immediately by going directly to your supporting reasons for examining the “ideological birth of military conscription,” which you have stated in your first paragraph, to fill out the basic proposal of research. The component most missing in your draft is an acknowledgment of views that would oppose your working assumptions. The discussion of methods that you will use to conduct this research and gather the data that you need should also be developed more fully in the ways I described in my post to Larry. This kind of discussion is not quite the same thing as saying what you will read (like history books) but, rather, indicating that you will use historical methods to ascertain what has happened over the past 60 years—and saying what that means.
