Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Harvard Law School
MIT 6.805/6.806/STS085: Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier
Guidelines and expectations for term papers
Final papers are due in the last class. We are expecting to see high-quality work with good writing, thoughtful commentary, and clear themes.
Papers should be about 7500 words long. This is longer than you think: 7500 words is about 18-20 pages. While we will not penalize papers a priori for being shorter than this, 7500 words indicates the depth of treatment we are looking for. Papers significantly below this length are unlikely to attain this depth, and thus unlikely to receive good grades.
Team Papers: There is no required longer length for a team paper, but we do expect team papers to be better, and more considered, so this is likely to result in a longer paper. For a team paper, each team should designate one person as editor, who will be responsible for putting together the final version and making the entire work uniform and coherent. Even though there is an editor, the team paper should have identifiable parts that are written by each team member. At the end of the team paper, include a note saying who the editor was, and who wrote which part of the paper (although everyone on the team is responsible for the quality of the entire paper).
Turn in your finished paper on-line. Send copies by email to the instructors. Send your paper in a format that can be easily converted to HTML if we decide to post it on the web. I.e., you can send as plain ASCII text, HTML, Word doc format, but not PDF. If you use HTML, make your paper a single document, not a collection of linked documents. Actually email us the paper -- don't just put it up on a web page and tell us the URL.
We require good quality writing. Papers with spelling, grammatical, or stylistic errors will be penalized in grading, or may not even be accepted. Good resources on writing are The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing, by Les Perelman, Ed Barrett, and Jim Paradis, and Grammar and Style Notes by Jack Lynch.
Get some people to read and comment on your paper before you turn it in. It may also be valuable to check over your paper with someone in the Writing Center.
Before making your final revision, go through the proofreading checklist given out in class.
Approach and Scope of Paper
We are certainly interested in your opinions and ideas. But you should treat this paper as research and analysis, not just venting or making unsubstantiated assertions. On the other hand, we do expect you to have opinions and a point of view on your topic -- not to just write a book report or a summary of what other people have said.
Your paper should have a thesis, i.e., an idea, claim, or argument that you are putting forward and defending in the paper. We expect that your paper will start out by stating the thesis in the first one or two paragraphs, and that you will proceed to support the thesis in a focused and coherent way. If you are unclear on what we mean by this, have a look at note from the RPI Writing Center, "Thesis Development in Analytical Writing".
Be sure to back up your arguments with facts and by citing source material. There is a tremendous amount of reference material available on-line in the course archives and other places on the net. If you cite unpublished on-line material, you can include citations or links to the appropriate URLs in the bibliography.
Note: For an explanation of how to cite legal cases, see Introduction to Basic Legal Citation by Peter W. Martin of Cornell Law School. The easiest place to start is in the example section (chapter 3).