Delegates are strongly encouraged to prepare and submit position papers for the conference. A distinctive plaque is awarded each year for the best position paper submitted and they may also count for points toward other awards as well.  Position papers must be submitted no later than noon on February 6, 2004 via email to the Director General Doug Greathouse at doug.greathouse@sinclair.edu to be considered for awards. Please submit them in either Microsoft Word (DOC) files or as rich text format (RTF) files to ensure we can open them. All submissions will be blind evaluated prior to the conference, so there are some basic rules that must be followed.  In addition, we are giving some suggestions to help ensure your submission is the best it can be.

Style Details:

In the top margin (Word header), please list the delegate name and school on the first line and the country and committee on the second line. The first line will be removed for the evaluation process and replaced with a serial number.

Margins should be set to one inch all around and use 12 point times roman font and single spacing.  Position papers must not exceed one side of one sheet of paper for all topics. It is not necessary to leave any blank lines--feel free to cram in everything you can as you really have very little space to work with. Make every word count!  Each topic must begin on a new line and start with the topic text followed by a colon.

All submissions become the copyright property of the Dayton Model UN Conference (DAYMUNC) with appropriate authorship credit given to the original author when published. DAYMUNC shall have the exclusive right to publish any submitted position paper on its website or by hard copy and also reserves the right to edit where necessary without exception.

Suggestions:

The following suggestions are offered to help guide your research and writing effort and are not the criteria for awards.  Position papers serve to suggest how a Member State will act during the conference. They are necessarily prospective, forward looking, statements of national policy.

1. Give your country's formal name once and only in the first line of each topic--afterward use appropriate pronouns or acronyms i.e. "UK" for the United Kingdom.

2. Position statements are generally expressed in plural first person but use care in your choice of verbs. For example, the government of a country can "know," "value," "think" or "believe" but it lacks the capacity to "feel." Third person can also be used to provide sentence variety.

3. It is a good idea to avoid using up space with flat facts (things like population, location, area, etc) as this information is readily available and really is not policy.

4. It is not meaningful to provide historical accounts of what the country has done in the past.  While historical policy may inform us of present policy, what is really desired are clear concise statements of what the county intends to do now.  Thus, long lists of ratified treaties and supported resolutions waste precious space and should be avoided. Rather than say that your country ratified the Genocide Convention, affirmatively state that your country is deeply committed to the eradication of Genocide in any form -- if that's your position.

5. The most important question a great position paper answers is what the country believes is the best solution to the problem being addressed.  Think of it this way--if your country was authoring the working paper and could do anything it wanted, what would that be?

6. Consider other alternatives your country might support as well.

7. It may well be that your country's policy is to oppose something. Generally, in most cases, diplomats will be quite cautious in how these objections would be phrased. So, such objections might be phrased as "remain concerned about" or "is open to frank dialogue" or something like that.

8. Focus your writing on the country's foreign policy. While domestic policy MAY in some cases inform us about foreign policy, this is not always true (for example, the position of the United States on capitol punishment).

Research Aids:

A variety of research aids are provided on this website in the resource area in addition to those provided in the background guides.  All UN resolutions are indexed to ease finding what you need.  In addition, general country information has also been provided. The list of NGOs will provide a wealth of issue background to help understand the problem and the current thinking in the area. You will also find links to a variety of current events sources as well. New resources are being added regularly, so keep checking the site frequently.  Finally, a number of previous year's position statements can be found in the DAYMUNC archive. We hope these resources and  suggestions will help you write an award winning paper!