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SOC 350: Poverty & Inequality (Forsythe-Brown)

Research Guide for Dr. Forsythe-Brown's section of the SOC 350 course

Writing Your White Paper

A white paper is an authoritative report or guide that discusses related issues and makes recommendations for addressing them or making decisions about them. Your white paper will draw on academic research, but it should be written for a lay audience.

Part 1. Introduction/Executive Summary

Summarizes what you will write and puts it into context. Should consist of 3 parts:

  • "What You're Studying": start with background contextualizing your topic/issue
  • "So What?": demonstrate why your topic/issue and its impacts are important and why your reader should care about them
  • "Game Plan": outline the main points of your paper and the order in which you will address them

Part 2. Background/Literature Review

You will synthesize your sources to provide a review of your topic and its background and context.. Your literature review should provide a compelling narrative about the importance of your topic/issue and build your evidence-based arguments for why the issues and problems associated with it are important. You will then use these to build your policy recommendations for fixing these issues and problems in Part 3.

Your literature review will bring together a variety of sources: 

  • theories and study results from peer-reviewed journals
  • data, statistics, and demographics
  • policy reports

Each paragraph of  this section represents one aspect of the paper's main focus. Each paragraph should include a topic sentence, evidence, analysis, and a transition sentence:

  • The topic sentence summarizes the paragraph's main idea
  • Use evidence from your research sources to support or make the argument for your assertions about your main idea
  • Analyze your evidence to show how it links to your broader white paper topic/issue
  • Include a transition sentence at the end of each paragraph to connect what you discussed in that paragraph with the main idea of the next paragraph

Part 3. Solutions

Build on your evidence-based arguments from your Literature Review to make arguments for potential solutions to the issues and problems you described in Part 2. Provide details about how these solutions would solve these problems and address these issues. Incorporate theories and concepts from this course into your description and analysis of your proposed solutions.

Part 4: Conclusion

Summarizes what you wrote and what you learned.

  • Briefly summarize your topics and why the issues and problems associated with it are important.
  • Briefly summarize your solutions to these problems and your arguments for why they would help. 
  • End with a strong, final statement that ties the whole paper together and makes it clear the paper has come to an end
  • No new ideas should be introduced in the conclusion, it should only review and analyze the main points from the body of the paper (with the exception of suggestions for further research)

Part 5: References list: a list of the sources you cited 

  • Cite your sources in APA Style

For more writing help, contact the Writing Center and make an online appointment to meet with one of their consultants.

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