Honors

Argument
Scope
Originality
Primary Research
Presentation
Procedural Issues
Schedule
Deadlines
A Final Note

"Honors quality" is imperfectly definable; it is, as with the case of pornography, a state of knowing it when one sees it (or reads it). There are, however, some necessary conditions for an honors paper. None is sufficient, for an honors paper achieves a remarkable synthesis of a number of attributes. What follows is a partial list of the necessary attributes.

Argument

The sine qua non of an honors paper is an argument. In the social sciences, an argument is a statement that a certain causal relationship exists between two or more human realities. Thus, an argument must always be susceptible to an "if…,then" statement. For example: "If a country wishes to avoid war, then it should be prepared for war" (with apologies to Vegetius). An argument is therefore a theoretical proposition, not a statement of historical "facts." One could not argue, although one could state, that "Switzerland avoided war" or that "Switzerland was prepared for war." A more interesting case would be "If Great Britain had been prepared to wage war, then it could have avoided World War II."

This is a very formal definition of an argument. As such, it is only a model to be kept in mind, rather than a rigid formula to impose on the writing at any cost. One should always remember that the only reason for writing an extended essay is to answer a troubling, important question as best as one can. A less formal way of conceptualizing an argument is to explain or interpret a possible answer to a significant question in a way that is both original and persuasive.

Scope

Obviously, the argument about Great Britain and World War II is difficult to prove. One of the problems is that the statement is imprecise. At what point should Britain have been prepared? 1933? 1936? 1939? What does "prepared" mean? Does it simply refer to armaments? Does it refer to political will? There are many other ambiguities to the theoretical argument. One must minimize these ambiguities as much as possible by defying the scope of the argument. This is a critical responsibility of the analyst but also a great advantage. By narrowing the scope of the argument, one can focus more precisely on the obligations of evidence and inference. For example, to prove successfully the validity of Vegetius's original proposition, one would have to examine a very large number of wars. To prove the proposition about Britain and World War II, one has only to examine one war, but there still remain a tremendous number of possible causes of that war.

Originality

Even if one were to argue that a prepared Britain could have avoided World War II, it is not clear that the theoretical proposition is original. A.J.P. Taylor investigated that argument form a particular perspective in his Origins of the Second World War. He did not, however, analyze the proposition from all perspectives. Simply because other authors have generally addressed the argument is no reason to abandon it. It does mean that one must find a distinctive issue or perspective, and take on the burden of demonstrating that the argument, but not necessarily the proposition, is substantially different from what others have done in the past.

This is a crucial requirement: to fail to demonstrate originality is to write essentially a book review. Originality, however, does not mean that one has to be definitive, i.e., that the thesis of the work provides the only true answer to an important question. Here, again, one needs merely to be able to say: "This is my explanation of why things happened the way they did, and it is different from the way others have interpreted the problem in the past." Originality does not require one to end all discussion. A.J.P. Taylor's book generated a tremendous controversy and left a large number of unresolved issues. When Taylor argued that Hitler "wanted the fruits of total victory without total war; and thanks to the stupidity of others he nearly got them, "he amassed a large amount of historical evidence to prove his point". When Hugh Trevor-Roper called Taylor's book "a disgrace" and A.L. Rouse claimed that it was a "whitewashing of Hitler," they also accumulated evidence to prove their positions. The point is that even in an overworked area like the origins of World War II, there are plenty of important issues which need to be analyzed further. Moreover, an analyst should take comfort in the fact that disagreement among scholars is both healthy and necessary.

Primary Research

An original argument must therefore also require primary research. Assuming that Taylor and Trevor-Roper were accurate in their understanding of the "facts," one could not resolve their differences by merely repeating their positions and evidence. One needs to go back to the primary "facts," not secondary interpretations of them. Primary research simply refers to evidence that has not been interpreted by another analyst: diaries of people directly involved in the action, oral histories, memoirs, the actual government cables or memos upon which the action was based, statistics which have been created only for the purposes of collecting data and not for proving a point, polls, interviews, government reports, and the like.

Primary research is part of the process of writing. While one should always start one's research with a question in mind, it is more than likely that that question will change in the course of investigation and analysis. Primary research is part of an iterated process: one asks a question, researches a possible explanation, refines the question in light of the research, investigates the new, more refined question, and so forth. There should be a constant and vigorous interaction between the research and the writing of a major essay.

Put simply, the absence of primary research suggests that the essay is not rooted in evidence, but rather based on an interpretation of others' interpretations. Such an essay could accomplish only one thing: a confirmation of something we already believe to be true, which, unfortunately, may also be the perpetuation of gilt-edged error. That outcome is unacceptable, and one that is avoided only by primary research.

Presentation

To be persuasive, an essay has to be well-written. In the social sciences and humanities, one never "proves" in the sense of the natural sciences and mathematics largely because one can never test thoroughly exact conditions over a long period of time. But one can persuade, carefully and fairly.

The act of persuasion is much more than logic and evidence; it relies on the ability to make logic and evidence both comprehensible and compelling. Honesty and good writing are the keys to persuasiveness. Honesty is the presentation of the details without exaggeration-never claim more than the evidence warrants. Good writing depends on clarity and precision-on direct language and structures. The final draft must be free of grammatical, syntactical, and typographical errors.

Procedural Issues

Working with one's advisor is crucial. There is a very thin line between doing independent work properly and improperly. Avoiding one's advisor is a disaster, and a disaster which becomes self-perpetuating the longer it goes on. Over-reliance on an advisor is a different type of disaster, one which vitiates the very idea of independent work. Every advisor and every student is different, so it is impossible to articulate a preferred routine with precision. Nonetheless, there are some guidelines which ought to be noted.

1. The student should meet with her advisors as soon as possible in the first term. Meeting times should be clearly established. Failure to keep these appointments is a sufficient reason for ending the project.
2. A work schedule should be discussed. It does not matter what the schedule is (once a week, once a month) (a chapter every two weeks or the finished draft in January). Again, these schedules should be clear and lack of adherence to them is a sufficient reason for ending the project.
3. The advisor's role is to give advice and to answer specific questions, not to provide an argument or to locate evidence. Students should avoid asking for such help, and advisors should avoid offering such help. The advisor should ask questions that challenge the student in an effort to stimulate a more critical perspective and tightly reasoned essay.
4. Time for reading drafts should be discussed. Some faculty have a quick turn-around time, others take longer.
5. Advisors should take great care in pressing their own points of view. Any student who thinks that her own point of view is being lost should raise the matter with her advisors as soon as possible.

Schedule

Ideally, a student should begin to formulate a research question and to do preliminary research in the spring semester of her junior year or during the summer before senior year. Often, research papers for seminars taken in previous years will provide the basis for an honors thesis. A research paper that gripped your interest on a topic that you felt could and should be explored more intensively makes for an excellent starting point in developing a proposal for honors work.

Don't worry if you return to campus for your senior year without having written a thesis proposal or having started research. It's not too late to begin a thesis and to write an excellent one. But you will have to work quickly to design a proposal and to choose advisors. The following is a general overview of the thesis-writing schedule. Specific dates for the current academic year may be found at the end of this overview.

By the end of September, you should have written a two-page thesis proposal. It should contain your research problem: What is the question that you hope to answer or resolve in your thesis? The proposal should also contain a tentative outline or table of contents of the final work and a paragraph or two outlining what methodology you hope to use in answering your question. You may also want to describe why this project is original or significant. The proposal should contain a short bibliography of works that you have consulted or intend to consult in your research. If you intend to conduct interviews or do archival research, with whom and where will this work be done? Finally, the proposal should contain the names of your primary and secondary advisors, one of whom should be a faculty member of the I.R. Program.

Shortly after your proposal is submitted, the I.R. Program faculty will meet to approve it and to suggest possible ways to refine it. If you have not identified a secondary advisor, the faculty committee will suggest someone.

By the middle of January, you must submit to your two advisors approximately 35-40 pages from your thesis. This work may be a shortened draft of your intended final thesis, or it may be one or two chapters out of the intended whole. What you choose to write should be approved in advance by your advisors. You should keep in mind that this work will be used by them to judge whether your work in the fall semester merits continuation in the spring semester as an honors thesis. So the work you submit should be broadly representative of the substance and quality of what you intend to submit as a final draft of your thesis.

By the beginning of April, you should submit a complete first draft of your thesis to your two advisors.

By the middle of April, you should submit a complete revised draft of your thesis to your two advisors. This version should reflect all suggestions for revisions of your complete first draft made by them. If at this point your two advisors decide that the work merits consideration for honors, a third reader will be appointed to review your work.

In early May, you will defend your thesis before the three faculty members who have read your thesis. If the chair of the I.R. Program is not one of the three readers, she or he will also be a member of the defense committee. In addition, all the members of the I.R. faculty will be invited to read and attend the defense.

During the oral defense, the committee may ask you to describe your argument in detail, how you conducted your research, and the problems or unresolved issues you identify in the final product. Based on your written thesis and your performance in the oral defense, your three readers will recommend a grade of highest honor, high honor, honor, or no honor to the full I.R. faculty committee.

The I.R. faculty committee's recommendation will then be forwarded to the Registrar's office. The final determination of graduation with a summa, magna, or cum laude ranking will be made by the Registrar's office.

Deadlines

• October 18: Thesis proposal is due in the I.R. office
• January 15: 35-40 pages of your thesis due to your advisors
• April 15: Complete revised first draft due to your advisors

A Final Note

This has been a listing of some of the prerequisites of an honors paper. It is incomplete, but it offers a springboard for further discussion between a student and her advisors. Remember that in the I.R. Program, no one works in an "honors" program until the second term, after a favorable review of the completed first draft. Prior to that point, all work is independent work. Further, even if a student is asked to continue into the second term, there is no guarantee that the final essay will be awarded honors. A third reader must read the final draft, and then all three readers will determine whether the essay should be presented to the full committee of the I.R. Program for honors consideration. It is the full committee that actually makes the decision as to whether the essay should be awarded honors.

The College has established certain rules governing the Honors Program. The legislation reads as follows:

• The Honors Program, consisting of a minimum of 8 credits distributed between at least two semesters, may be undertaken with the approval of the department or major committee concerned by any senior who, prior to her senior year, has maintained a cumulative average of 3.00 in her college work or a 3.00 in her major field.
• Any student who has questions about these procedures should talk with her advisor.