Paper Proposal

• What do you plan to write about? This question won't surprise you, but what might surprise you is that you should choose something rather narrowly focused. The key is to be narrow so that you can be deep -- broad and shallow results in a "book report" style, which is most definitely not what we are looking for. The writing process tends to expand your scope a bit rather naturally (as you think of related things), so starting narrow is a key to finishing with someethign deep to say. As an example, don't write about the use of text classication for e-discovery -- that's way too broad. Instead, write about something narrow such as what risk arise when text classification is used to automate the review for responsiveness when searchig email collections, and how those risks can be mitigated. That's just one example -- you can choose something related to policy, to process, to technology, to innovation, to social acceptance in different cultures, or to any other type of issue that you find to be of interest.
• What do you have to say about it? This is the real key. You should strive to write a paper that others could not write as well. Not just others in the class -- others in the world. To answer this well, you need to think seriously about what YOU bring to the topic that you have selected. You might initially be tempted to say "I am still learning -- what would I have to say at this point that others would want to hear." That misses the point, however -- as a grad student you bring a background to a topic that others don't have. And you have the savvy to follow your passions to learn new things that others do not yet know well. So the trick is to iterate between your topic and what aspects of your background (and passions) to converge a topic where you really do have something to say.
• Where do you plan to publish it? This will help to define your audience and your genre (academic, professional, popular, ...).