Each student will be required to complete a 1200-word APA Style research paper. You must include a separate proper title page at the top of your submission and a separate properly formatted source page. The project should have at least 1200 words of text not counting the title and reference pages. Students will be required to use (5) five scholarly references, and two of these references must be peer-reviewed journal articles from the APUS online library databases. Please note that Wikipedia, dictionaries, encyclopedias, endnotes, ehow, etc. are not scholarly resources. If in doubt about your source, please ask your instructor before using. The paper is due by Sunday of week 7 and is worth 15% of your class grade. Submit your paper into the “assignment” area via a word doc only and to Turnitin. Failure to submit your paper for review to Turnitin will result in an automatic 20 pt. deduction. You can re-submit to the “research paperrevision” section as many times as necessary to analyze your paper to check your index rating, but only once per 24hrs, so plan accordingly. Students are required to follow APA Style guidelines. There is a sample paper under Lessons and Resources that students can use as a template for their project. Feel free to copy and keep the sample paper as a model to help guide your work. The class instructor will read and grade your papers with professor comments for improvement as needed. The course will be using the Criminal Justice Writing Rubric to grade the Term Project. The rubric is in the lessons, resources, and attached to this assignment. Please make sure that you are using the writing rubric as a checklist as you work on the Term Project. You are to select one topic from below that you are interested in and would like to learn more about. There is no special requirement on the content. Discussing case laws and articles associated with your paper is acceptable. You do not have to notify the instructor of your choice. Your research paper must be formatted in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association Sixth Edition (APA style). You can find help with APA Style guidelines within the AMU Online Library or at www.apastyle.org. Do not copy large sections of text verbatim, cited or uncited, from the Web or your paper will be severely penalized. You must cite within the paper per APA standards. Papers submitted to previous classes or other universities are not permitted.

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Writing Assignment #3 will be a synthesis essay, a format that is sometimes referred to as a literature review. Please click here for a video that briefly describes and outlines this writing assignment.
Organization:
Your synthesis essay should be organized in the following manner:
•Introduction: Write one or two paragraphs in which you introduce the reader to your topic. •Body-the categories into which you are dividing the literature: Divide your sources into a few categories. A suggestion is that you divide them into three to five categories.
•Conclusion: Summarize what the literature says on your topic.
Approach:

In the synthesis essay, you will focus your research efforts in a particular area, perhaps as a response to what you found while writing the annotated bibliography. You will then conduct more research and synthesize your findings in this synthesis essay.

Approach and Requirements
Your synthesis essay, or literature review, should be 2000-2500 words, not including your “references” pages at
the end of the review. In other words, the text of the paper should be 2000-2500 words.
In addition your synthesis essay should include at least 10 scholarly sources in the “references” section. As stated above, this means that you may decide not to use all 12 sources that you summarized in your annotated bibliography. You are free to use all 12 of them. However, it is possible that your experience in writing summaries of the 12 sources led you to conclude that a few of them will not be as helpful to your topic as you had originally thought. You may decide not to include such sources in the synthesis essay. This is totally up to you. Moreover, you might find other sources that you would like to include in your synthesis essay that were not included in your annotated bibliography. You may use such sources in your synthesis essay as well.