The purpose of the assignment is to marshal what youve learned in class, and what youve explored in your previous pieces of writing, in order to advance a clear, original argument about the patient-provider relationships in the course reading. Patient-provider relationships are meant in the broadest sense possible, covering person-to-person interactions as well as the medical industrys relationship to patients, more publicly conceived. In other words, you are invited to write about any aspect of the relationship (its absence or presence, its health, its consequences, its development, challenges or triumphs, and so on) between patients and providers that our course reading frames: politics, patient outcomes, negligence, intimacy, music, race, history, religion, family, friendship, gender, consent, grief, eavesdropping, obligation, sex, etc. Whatever your central concern, your task is to write a well-designed, well-developed, paper that offers close readings of significant moments from your chosen text as evidence to support your reading/argument.
There are two specific requirements for this paper:
First, this is an argumentative paper, one backed up by evidence from the text; it should also be backed up by at least two secondary sources that are to be cited in your paper. Your secondary sources can come from scholarly books or articles published in peer-reviewed journals, written for either the Sciences or the Humanities. Someones personal blog or a student-study site like Gradesaver or Sparknotes do not count as peer-reviewed. Set up a meeting with a librarian (UTM librarians are specialists and are here to support the research of the universitythat includes your work), or browse the relevant shelves at the main library; draw on the librarys online database catalog (for example, Jstor and Proquest One Academic) for relevant sources related to your text and topic. Your goal is to synthesize and organize the information you gather from these sources into your analysis by introducing readers to a scholarly conversation. Citations from all sources should be given parenthetically just after the quote or reference, with a Works Cited listed, in MLA style, at the end.
Second, at some point, your paper should bring two texts from this class into conversation with one another. While you should focus on one central text (like Frankenstein) in your paper, I am asking you to take the ideas from another text and set them into the conversation. For example, how can you use Skloots The Immortal Life or Gawandes Being Mortal to think through Shelleys Frankenstein? How can Biss On Immunity help us read Woolfs On Being Ill? The point is to read one text by the light of another. To be clear, this is not a comparative paper, where you say, Skloot does this, but Sacks does this; however, Sacks does this, and Skloot does that! Rather, the point is to use one text and its ideas to help produce or frame the reading of another.
Requirements:
5-7 pages, double spaced, one-inch margins, and carefully, meticulously proofread. 12-pt times new roman font.
1-inch margins, 12-point font. Use MLA formatting for your citations.
You will be evaluated on the following criteria: relevance to the prompt; argument and thesis, analysis and support (research + close reading), organization and structure, and mechanics.
Here are some suggestions: You might take a thematic approach to your paper and discuss a recurring idea that you believe is central. For example, you might trace empathy, or death, vanity, racism, illusion, etc., and how it affects our reading of a particular text / its notion of the relationships between patients and providers. You may choose to concentrate on a specific image or metaphor and trace its development throughout the text. Alternatively, ask yourself what historical events or determinants seem especially crucially represented or grappled with by your primary text? What aspects of this history do you want to investigate? Whatever the case may be, your analysis should be focused enough that what you are demonstrating to your reader is clear: a good indication of this will be whether or not your thesis statement is focused and specific.
