Research proposal guidelines: All proposals must describe what you are planning to do and convey why this is a reasonable, important, and interesting plan. The 7 parts of the generic proposal template described below serve these purposes. Below is a description of these 7 parts. 1. What is the general area in which your study is located? This section requires that you locate your project with respect to a larger area of research. For example, for Linguistics you may have a general area of “stress rules in Spanish,” “discourse markers,” “non- manual marking in ASL syntax,” or “language development in Williams Syndrome” that are general topic areas that do not, in themselves, constitute research questions