Expectations, Guidelines, Advice, and Grading An excellent set of guidelines by Professor Daniel E. White at the University of Puget Sound. Note checklist at the end.
Minimum length is one page.
Secondary sources are works about them, their writings, their times, etc. Thoughts about Experimental Critical Writing I consider it the writer's responsibility, and no one else's, to come up with her own topic or question. At the end of this document, I list some thoughts about various possible topics, but any one of them would have to be further refined and focused before it would be serviceable. You can ignore this list altogether, if you wish, and start from scratch. In my experience, it works better if you come up with a research question, rather than a topic.