Category: Weekly Writing Assignments

This week’s Weekly Writing Assignment has two parts: one part that you will submit as a comment to this post by next week and one part that you will develop on your own in preparation for next week’s Weekly Writing Assignment.

First, the part that you turn in this week is a sampling of your research. I would like you to add a comment to this post with three quotes from your research with parenthetical, in-text citations and the three bibliographic references for those quotes. For this task, you do not need to format it as a memo. The quotes, citations, and bibliographic references is all that I need to see. This will show me that you are doing the important research needed for this project. These quotes and references should go eventually into your 750-1000-Word Expanded Definition Project. Your comment should look something like this with the information filled in:

“This is a quote” (Author, Year, pp. pages).

Author, A. A. (Year). Title of article. Title of Periodical, volume number(issue number), pages. https://doi.org/xx.xxx/yyyy

“This is a second quote” (Author, Year, pp. pages).

Author, A. A. (Year). Title of article. Title of Periodical, volume number(issue number), pages. https://doi.org/xx.xxx/yyyy

“This is a third quote” (Author, Year, pp. pages).

Author, A. A. (Year). Title of article. Title of Periodical, volume number(issue number), pages. https://doi.org/xx.xxx/yyyy

Second, you should begin writing a first draft of your 750-1000-Word Expanded Definition Project on your own. I don’t need to see this yet, but you will use it for peer review and next week’s weekly writing assignment. It’s important to write as much as you can. In the lecture, I mention how important it is to spend time doing the research first to locate definitions to quote through the library and then find sentences using your term to quote in library and web-based sources. Below, I am including a general format of your Expanded Definition Project memo. Feel free to copy-and-paste it into the document that you are writing as your first draft. Delete my text as needed. Also, the bracketed text for headings should be removed. These are guidelines for how your document should look when you submit it in a couple of weeks.

Your Name’s Expanded Definition of YOUR TERM [Title for your OpenLab Post]

TO: Prof. Jason Ellis

FROM: Your Name

DATE: Due Date

SUBJECT: Expanded Definition of YOUR TERM

Introduction  [Heading Level 2] 

What is the purpose of this document? What term are you defining? How are you discussing the way it is defined and the way it is used in context? Describe a road map for what follows (definitions and context). This content should be published as paragraphs, unlike the heading for this section, which is a level 2 heading.

Definitions [Heading Level 2]

Quote several definitions of the term that you selected. Provide quotes and parenthetical citations for each definition and include your sources in the References section at the end of the document. Each definition that you include deserves discussion in your words about what it means and how it relates to the other definitions that you include. Consider how they are alike, how are they different, who might use one versus another, etc.

Context [Heading Level 2]

Quote several sentences from a variety of sources that use the term in context. A range of sources would provide the best source material for your discussion of how the term is used in these contexts. For example, a quote from an academic journal or two, a quote from a newspaper or magazine, a quote from a blog, and a quote from social media would give you a range of uses that might have different audiences. For each quote, you should devote at least as much space as the quote discussing what it means in that context and how it relates to the other quotes in context. Each quote should be in quotes, have a parenthetical citation, and a bibliographic entry in your references at the end of your document.

Working Definition [Heading Level 2]

Based on the definitions that you quoted and discussed, and the contextual uses of the term that you quoted and discussed, write a working definition of the term that’s relevant to your career field or major, which you will need to identify (this is the specific context for your working definition).

References [Heading Level 2]

Order your APA-formatted bibliographic references by the author’s last name, alphabetically.

While we are concluding the first 500-Word Summary Project, we are moving ahead with the 750-1000-Word Expanded Definition Project. It is described on the syllabus as:

For this week’s writing assignment, I would like you to do some brainstorming about what term you would like to explore in this project.

To that end, write a short memo with the following information:

• Memo Block (TO, FROM, DATE, SUBJECT: 750-1000-Word Expanded Definition Brainstorming)
• One sentence stating three terms that you will choose from.
• One sentence definition for each of the three terms in your own words–no citing, no looking at the web, use only what is in your own brain.
• After using the databases, Oxford English Dictionary, and ebooks available through the Library’s website, write one sentence stating which of the three terms you have selected as the focus of your expanded definition project.

Save your memo some place safe and then copy-and-paste it into a comment made to this post.

As discussed in the Week 3 lecture posted below, I discuss in detail the parameters of this week’s writing assignment and how it supports your overall success on the first major project: the 500-Word Summary. Please review the lecture carefully and make notes in your notebook. One of the nice things about taking notes from a video is that you can pause it while you are writing!

Here is an outline of what you need to accomplish for this week’s writing assignment:

• Create a first draft of your 500-Word Summary
  • Turn your reverse outline memo into a first draft by removing the paragraph numbers and chunking your sentences into one long paragraph or several smaller paragraphs. The summaries that you wrote of each paragraph in the article allows you to quickly create a draft summary of the entire article. You will likely need to read over it and add language to create a flow from each sentence to the next, or each paragraph (of yours) to the next.
  • Add a sentence below the memo header and above your summary that states the purpose of the memo. For example: This memo is a 500-word summary of the article, “Write Title of Article,” by Some Author, a researcher at IBM (look in the article or online for information about the author that you can add to contextualize them). If you have multiple authors, you might have to leave off this information unless there is a common workplace. Another option is to include their affiliation in parenthesis after each name.
  • Find one sentence or phrase in the article to quote and cite in the body of your summary. Use APA style for the in-text citation (see third paragraph here).
  • Edit the draft as much as possible to hit the 475 < 500 < 525 window for your 500-word summary. Since this is a draft, it is okay if it is shorter or longer than the window, but more work that you do now on your writing will save you work later.
• Conduct peer-review of your writing with a small team of students.
  • On Wednesday, Sept. 9 in the afternoon, I will begin sending emails to randomly assigned small teams of students. These will arrive in your official City Tech email account, so watch for them.
  • After you have completed your first draft (please do so as quickly as possible), click on “Reply All” (as shown in the lecture video) to the email that I sent you. This will send your email to Prof. Ellis and your teammates. Write a brief email thanking your team in advance for giving you feedback. Copy-and-paste your draft summary memo into the email below your message and then click send.
  • As you receive emails from your teammates, read their summaries and then click “Reply All” and include the following in your email: Salutation to the author of the summary you are responding to, a sentence or two about what you think works in their summary, a sentence or two about what needs correcting (and give advice about how to correct, perhaps one example), and whether their APA cited quote in the body of their summary and bibliographic reference at the bottom of the memo look correct (refer to the Purdue OWL APA pages here and here. Then, click send.
  • Collect the feedback that your 500-word summary receives as you will need this next week when you revise your 500-word summary for the final draft and for the weekly writing assignment.
• Pro Tips
  • Remember to create versions of each document that you write in our class. For example, open your reverse outline memo in your word processor and choose “Save As” and save it with a new file name, such as “500-word summary draft 1.” Next week, you can do this to the “draft 1” file and save it as “draft 2” or “final draft.”
  • Before sending your emails, double check that you have chosen to “Reply All” so that your teammates and I will receive your responses.

As discussed in this week’s lecture, the weekly writing assignment for Week 2 is connected to the 500-Word Summary project. The idea is to create a reverse outline of the article that you select to summarize, because this work will help you better understand each part of the article and it will generate text that you can utilize in the first draft of your 500-Word Summary.

After watching the lecture and making notes, do these things to begin the 500-Word Summary project and accomplish this week’s writing assignment:

• Go to the City Tech Library’s website, navigate to Find Articles, click on the corresponding letters to find the suggested databases for your research (Academic Search Complete, Applied Science and Tech Source, Science Direct, Springerlink ejournals, Wiley Online, or IEEE Xplore).
• Using one or more of the databases, find an article that is at least 5 pages or longer that is on a subject relevant to your studies and interesting to you.
• Using the database’s citation tool or the Purdue OWL’s APA guide to references for periodicals, write a bibliographic reference for the article that you selected in your word processor of choice.
• Then, read the article’s abstract and keep it’s overview in your mind.
• Next, read the first paragraph of the body of the article (this follows immediately after the abstract–if there is one, otherwise, it is the first paragraph of text after the article title).
• Put the article aside and pull up your word processing document with the bibliographic entry.
• Above the bibliographic entry, type “1.” followed by a one sentence summary of that paragraph’s main point, terms, idea, etc. in your own words. It is important to keep the article out of view when you do this. Don’t quote anything. Put it all in your own words what you remember about that paragraph.
• Return to the article and read the second paragraph. Put away the article and return to your word processor document. Below your sentence for the first paragraph and above the bibliographic entry, type “2.” followed by your one sentence summary of that paragraph. Continue in this way for all of the other paragraphs in the article, numbering each.
• Finally, add a memo header to the top of your word processor document, TO, FROM, DATE, SUBJECT (refer to lecture for what you should write).
• Copy and paste your completed reverse outline document into a comment added to this post. If you haven’t done this before, click on the title of this post and then scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the comment box. Make sure that you are logged into OpenLab. Copy-and-paste your reverse outline (memo heading, paragraph summaries, and bibliographic entry) into the comment box and then click “Post Comment.” Wait a moment to see your comment post on the site.
• Post your reverse outline by the beginning of next week of class, Wednesday, 9/9.
• Return to your word processor and save a new version of your reverse outline, which you can use as the beginnings of your 500-word summary first draft. Saving a new version of this file will allow you to return to your earlier work (think versioning) in case it is needed. In your new file, take out the numbers next to each paragraph summary and edit the document so that the summary sentences form one long or several shorter paragraphs. You may begin editing this into your first draft of the project, and we will discuss what we will do with this first draft in next week’s lecture.

As described in the second lecture video for Week 1, your first Weekly Writing Assignment is to send an email of introduction to Prof. Ellis (jellis at citytech.cuny.edu, of course, replace the “at” with the at sign–@) from your City Tech email account. If you’ve forgotten the password to your City Tech email account, visit this site to reset your password.

Below are the guidelines for your email of introduction:

• Send an email to Prof. Ellis at jellis@citytech.cuny.edu from your City Tech email account.
• Subject line: ENG2575 Student Introduction
• Salutation (e.g., Dear/Greetings/Hi/Hello Prof. Ellis,)
• Body: Tell me about yourself, your major, career goals, hobbies, what you want to get out of our class
• Closing: (e.g., Best, Best wishes, Cheers, Sincerely [your name or how you would like me to refer to you]

The goal is to complete each Weekly Writing Assignment before the next week’s lecture so that you do not get behind.

I look forward to hearing from you all! I will reply to each student’s email as they are received.

Also, while we are all getting acquainted with the class and how we do things, please remember to scroll down to make sure that you don’t miss the lecture videos, or you can click on the links to the left to find them.