The written assignment for two classes History of Modern Physical Sciences and History of Modern Earth and Life Sciences has two components: (1) A topic with bibliographic references, and (2) the paper itself. Both assignments should be submitted to Moodle on the date set in the class Moodle site.
Paper Topic
You should decide on a topic to write you paper about, and describe your topic and the approach you will take to it in about 250–500 words. This should then be followed by a bibliography of some 5–15 academic sources for your paper. You can choose any topic of interest to you that is related to what we are studying in class. It should be a topic that you want to go into in more depth than what was covered in class. There are some suggestions for topics on the class website, but it would be best if you choose your own topic.
In order to find academic sources, you can start from the bibliographies of the assigned readings related to your topic, but you should also use the online databases of the university website. For more information on finding academic sources, see the section titled “Research” in the Suggestions and Guidelines for Written Work.
You can use any bibliographic style for your list of sources, but you should use whatever style you choose consistently. For a discussion of citation styles, see “Finding, Citing, and Integrating Sources.”
Paper
The paper itself should be around 2000–5000 words. It should be a discussion of a historical topic as covered in the lectures or readings. You may use genAI to help yourself formulate your thinking, but please do the writing yourself. For detailed instructions on how to write an academic paper see the “Pre-Writing” and “Writing” sections in Suggestions and Guidelines for Written Work.