Self and/or Peer Revision Questions
For Research Proposal Introduction
Use these questions to guide your comments and/or thoughts while evaluating your own (or
someone else’s) research proposal introduction to help with revision. Make comments directly
on the person’s draft. These questions are just a guide; you should also comment on anything
else that you think needs revision.
Overall, was the information presented clearly and goal-driven, or it organized in a very
scattered manner with no apparent direction?
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Was the argument obvious throughout all the sections of the proposal?
Was the choice of citations appropriate with respect to the discussed argument?
Did you describe and explain all the relevant aspects of previous research in a review of
the literature?
Did you use the introduction to motivate reasonable predictions about the potential
outcome(s) of the proposed experiment or model?
Did you structure the methods section clearly?
Will the experiment/investigation model, as proposed, be appropriate to deal with the
argument suggested in the introduction?
Are your experiments/investigation models well-designed? Do you see any obvious
design flaws?
How clever are the suggested experiments/investigation models? That is, did you simply
suggest looking at some existing issue as a function of some other variable with no
apparent motivation, or did the investigation represent a real attempt to either confirm or
deny some theory, or discriminate between existing views or theories?
Are there any alternatives to the experimental/investigative model design? What is the
justification of your choice?
Is predicted outcome of the experiments/models realistic? What are the alternatives?
Can one person (you) conduct suggested amount of work?
And finally: Is this project exciting?