What should an M.A. thesis or dissertation proposal look like?
There is a “five-fold path to prospectus happiness.” That is, every proposal should have the following 5 items, preferably in this order: • What is the question you are trying to answer? Indeed, it is preferable to begin the proposal with a question. Often if you can’t ask this question in less than a paragraph, you need to do more work. The purpose here is make you be as clear as possible about what your project is. • What are the usual answers to this question (i.e., your literature review, but done not as a listing of authors and their individual contributions, but rather aggregated into consistent schools of thought regarding the problem. Thus, for state formation you might break authors up into 3 different schools: those who say war made states (Hintze, etc.); those who say domestic factors (like national character) made states (Ranke, etc.) those who say it was the interaction of war making with domestic characteristics (Tilly, Ertman, etc.). Describe these authors in terms of th
