Students are required to write a paper based on the book Caught Up. Here, students must write about the scholarly contribution of the book, with equal space allocated to considering its contribution to (1) theory and (2) methods.

Students are encouraged to write about what the author describes as his goal in writing the book and how those goals are achieved in the text.

The paper must be 750 to 1000 words long

(1) Begin the paper with a brief statement.”This paper describes how [insert your own words here] and [insert your own words here] are significant scholarly contributions of Caught Up”

(2) Then jump in to describing these contributions in greater detail.

(3) Theory refers to the concepts, tools, and ideas sociologists develop in order to explain a phenomenon in the social world.

(4) Methods refer to “what” data sociologists collect and “how” they do so.

(5) When you are describing a contribution, make sure to draw on examples from the text. You can paraphrase an anecdote from the text or use a direct quote. In either case, make sure that you put the page number that the information is found on into parentheses. For example: (148). Warning: do not just cut and paste huge chunks of the book into your paper in order to meet the word count. Use material from the book judiciously.

(6) Spend a roughly equal amount of space in your paper on theory and methods.

(7) The last two sentences of your paper should be something like: “In conclusion, this paper has described the significant scholarly contributions of the book to be [insert your own words here] and [insert your own words here]. Future research would do well to [insert your own words here].”

(8) If you go slightly over 1000 word ceiling that is ok. If you do not meet the 750 word floor, that is a problem.

(9) Standard formatting is appreciated. Microsoft Word, 12 point Times New Roman, 1″ margins on all sides. Single, 1.5 or double-spaced is fine.