# Project Milestone 3: Abstract + Completion Plan

**Due: March 20 (submit PDF on Blackboard)**

This milestone has two parts: a formal project abstract and a week-by-week completion plan.

By this point you've had time to think about two directions and gotten feedback on both. Now it's time to commit to one — or a hybrid — and sharpen it into a concrete research plan. The goal isn't to have everything figured out, but to have a clear enough direction that you can make steady progress through the rest of the semester.

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## Part 1: Abstract

Write a formal abstract for your project (roughly 200–300 words). This is the kind of abstract you'd write for a conference paper submission — concise, specific, and self-contained.

Your abstract should address all of the following:

### Working title

Provide a working title. It doesn't have to be final, but it should reflect what your project is actually about.

### Research question and hypothesis

This is the most important part. By M3, your research question should be specific enough to generate a **testable scientific hypothesis** — a quantifiable prediction that your analysis can support or refute.

A hypothesis is stronger than a question: it commits to an expected direction or pattern. For example:
- *Question: Do different genres of English differ in syntactic complexity?*
- *Hypothesis: Newswire texts in the Penn Treebank will show greater average dependency length than fiction texts, reflecting the more complex clause structure typical of formal written registers.*

You don't need to be right — that's the point of running the analysis. But you need to make a prediction, not just observe what happens.

### Data

Name the specific dataset(s) you will use and provide a citation or URL. If you plan to collect or compile data yourself, describe the source and scope concretely.

Data access is often the biggest source of project delays. If there's any uncertainty about whether you can actually obtain the data, address it here. If you still have concerns, flag them in Part 2 (ask for guidance).

### Methods

Describe the analysis you will perform. What are you actually doing, in concrete terms? This might include:
- Corpus counts, frequency distributions, or collocations
- Part-of-speech or syntactic pattern extraction
- Acoustic measurements (formants, duration, pitch)
- Statistical tests (t-test, ANOVA, correlation, regression)

What is your basis for comparison? (e.g., across genres, dialects, speakers, time periods, languages)

### Expected findings

What do you expect to find, and why? This doesn't have to be elaborate — a sentence or two connecting your hypothesis to your methods is enough.

### Significance

Briefly: why does this matter? What larger question about language does it connect to?

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## Part 2: Completion Plan

List all broad tasks needed to complete the project, organized week by week from now through the end of the semester. Your plan should account for all remaining milestones and deadlines:

| Date | Milestone |
|------|-----------|
| Apr 1 | M4: Progress checkpoint |
| Apr 20 | Peer-review workshop (in class) |
| Apr 27–29 | Presentations |
| Finals week | Final writeup due |

A good completion plan:
- Breaks the project into concrete tasks (not just "work on data")
- Is realistic about what's achievable in each window
- Shows a coherent arc from data → analysis → results → writing

If you're working with a partner, specify which tasks each person is responsible for and briefly explain why the division makes sense given your backgrounds and interests.

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## Ask for Guidance

Use this milestone to surface anything you'd like help with. I can respond in writing, or we can meet to talk through it.

Some things worth flagging if they apply to you:
- Uncertainty about data access or feasibility
- Questions about which statistical test or analysis method is appropriate
- Questions about scope (too ambitious? not ambitious enough?)
- Anything about the research design that feels underspecified

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## Formatting and logistics

- Submit as a single PDF on Blackboard
- No strict length requirement; 1-2 pages is typical
- If working with a partner, both members submit the same document