ENG2575 OL68 Technical Writing, Fall 2021

This week’s Weekly Writing Assignment has two parts. The first part should be submitted as a comment made to this post. The second part should be conducted over email with your team. Watch this week’s lecture from start to finish before proceeding.

The first component of this week’s Weekly Writing Assignment is the beginning research that you need to accomplish for the second major project: 750-1000-Word Expanded Definition. Think of several possible technical or scientific terms, phrases, or acronyms that would be interesting to research the definition, etymology, and context of. Then, using the resources described in the Week 3 lecture, see which term might have the most useful material for you to use on the project. Once you see which term might yield the most research material, write a 250-word memo describing the terms that you considered, which library and approved sources yielded the most useful material (give accurate and specific titles), and what term you decided to choose for your expanded definition based on what you found in your initial research. Your memo should look like this:

TO: Prof. Ellis
FROM: [Your Name]
DATE: 9/29/2021
SUBJECT: Expanded Definition Term: [Term you selected]

First sentence should state the purpose of the memo in your own words. Follow with the possible terms you choose from, discuss the resources that you looked in, and state which term you chose for your expanded definition based on your initial research.

After you have written your memo, copy-and-paste it into a comment made to this post and click “Post Comment.” As I showed in a previous lecture, you click on the title of “Weekly Writing Assignment, Week 3” and scroll to the bottom to find the comment box where you copy-and-paste your memo.

The second component of this week’s Weekly Writing Assignment is to use email to connect with your teammates by clicking “Reply All” to the email that Prof. Ellis will send to each team. Follow the directions in Prof. Ellis’ email to initiate introductions and to share the draft of your 500-Word Summary rough draft with your teammates for peer review. We will talk about revising and posting the final draft of your 500-Word Summary during next week’s lecture.

This week’s writing assignment will help you develop the scaffolding for your 500-word summary project by creating a reverse outline of the article that you find in your research on a topic related to your field of study and eventual career field. This is due by our next week of lecture on Wednesday, Sept. 22.

Watch this week’s lecture and make notes before proceeding!

For this Weekly Writing Assignment, do the following (detailed in this week’s lecture):

• Find an article in the library’s databases on an appropriate topic and of sufficient length (Remember: go to library.citytech.cuny.edu > Find Articles > click on “A” for Academic Search Complete and Academic OneFile or click on “I” for IEEE Explore)
• Create a new document in your word process of choice (Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, LibreOffice, etc.).
• Write a memo addressed to Prof. Ellis with the subject “Reverse Outline.”
• Under the memo header, type “1.” followed by one sentence in your own words summarizing the first paragraph of the article that you chose. Then, type “2.” on the next line followed by one sentence in your own words summarizing the second paragraph. Write an enumerated sentence for each paragraph until you reach the end of your selected article. Do not make the mistake of using the author’s words in your one sentence summary–put away the article when you write each summary sentence so that you express the main idea of each paragraph using only your own words.
• Conclude with a section titled “Reference” followed by an IEEE formatted reference entry for the article. See my example in the lecture, and use this, this, and this for additional help.
• Copy-and-paste your memo into a comment made to this Weekly Writing Assignment post.

Also, you have some homework to accomplish before Wednesday, Sept. 22.

First, “reply-all” to the “Team Assignment” email that I will send you during the next two weeks. Follow the directions contained in the email to meet your fellow teammates and to show Prof. Ellis that you are actively taking part in establishing rapport with your teammates.

Second, take your reverse outline that you prepared for this week’s Weekly Writing Assignment and paste it into a new document on your computer or in the cloud. Remove the numbers before each summary sentence. Consolidate the sentences into paragraphs or one large paragraph. Read the sentences and edit as needed to create flow from one sentence to the next. Then, add a memo header as shown below (edit the subject according to my directions in the lecture or as you see below–meaning the main topic of your selected article), add an introductory sentence explaining what the document is (see the example first sentence below), and add a significant quote from your selected article with an in-text citation in IEEE Style as shown in the first paragraph below. This will yield a rough draft of your 500-word summary for the first project, which we will conduct peer review on during the week beginning on Sept. 22. Save this document until Sept. 22. We will use it for that week’s Weekly Writing Assignment

TO:       Prof. Ellis
FROM:     Your Name
DATE:     Oct. 6, 2021
SUBJECT:  500-Word Summary of Article About Virtual Reality

The following is a 500-word summary of a peer-reviewed article about tracking human bodies in virtual reality. The authors discuss the body tracking software that they developed called Pfinder by showing how the software was developed, tested, and improved. According to Wren et al., “To  address  this  need  we  have  developed  a  real-time  system called   Pfinder   (“person   finder”)   that   substantially   solves   the problem  for  arbitrarily  complex  but  single-person,  fixed-camera situations” [1, p. 780]. 

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Reference

[1]     C. R. Wren, A. Azarbayejani, T. Darrell, and A. P. Pentland, (1997). “Pfinder: Real-time tracking of the human body,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 19, no. 7, pp. 780-785, July 1997, doi: 10.1109/34.598236.

After watching this week’s lecture (embedded in the post above) and reading this article on best practices for emailing professors, complete your first Weekly Writing Assignment by sending an email of introduction from your official City Tech email account to Prof. Ellis at jellis@citytech.cuny.edu according to the following parameters:

• Send an email to Prof. Ellis at jellis@citytech.cuny.edu from your City Tech email account.
• Subject line: ENG2575 [Your Section] Student Introduction
• Salutation
• Body: Tell me about yourself, your major, career goals, hobbies, what you want to get out of our class, and your availability for teamwork.
• Closing: Sign with your name or how
  you would like me to refer to you.
• If you need to reset your City Tech email password, go to forgot.citytech.cuny.edu.