ENG2575 OL83 Technical Writing, Spring 2021

As we begin to wrap up the 500-Word Summary Project, we will use peer review to request and receive feedback from your peers in the class. This serves two purposes: 1) you get experience working with the writing of others, which improves your writing ability through this critical engagement, and 2) you receive invaluable feedback and suggestions on how to improve your own writing from others.

To perform peer review on this assignment, do the following after watching this week’s lecture above:

• Watch for an email on Wednesday from Prof. Ellis to you and your teammates.
  • Choose to “Reply All” to this email. This will send a single reply message to all recipients of the original email, which includes your teammates and Prof. Ellis.
  • Open with a salutation to everyone.
  • Introduce yourself to your team (major, career goals, hobbies).
  • Write a message to your team–ask for feedback and offer to provide feedback.
  • Copy-and-paste your 500-summary below your message.
  • Give a closing and signature (Best, Your Name or Cheers, Your Name).
• As you receive emails from your team:
  • Read their 500-Word Summary
  • Click “Reply All” to their message
  • Write a brief email (Salutation, Body, Closing)
  • In the body: 
    • What works best
    • What needs improvement
    • Quote one random sentence and rewrite
      it as a suggestion
• Remember to be polite, understanding, work through problems, be considerate, be the bigger person if there are any misunderstandings.
• Feel free to use your emails for discussion about the project and your team, but keep all discussion professional and appropriate.
• Reach out to Prof. Ellis if there are any unsolvable problems within your team at any point during the semester.

As discussed in the lecture this week, this week’s homework on the 500-Word Summary project is to transform the reverse outline that you wrote last week into a first draft that you will share with your team and Prof. Ellis as a part of next week’s homework (I will cover this in the Week 3 Lecture).

In the Week 2 lecture above, I show how to format your 500-Word Summery as a memo, add an introductory topic sentence, add a road map sentence, incorporate a quote and citation, and add a reference in APA format at the end of the document. The example that I created in the lecture is included below for your reference.

After you have completed your first draft, save a copy and be ready to circulate it next week after I assign teams. When you share your work, your teammates will provide feedback and Prof. Ellis will see your work. I will explain this more next week.

TO:      Prof. Ellis
FROM:    Your Name
DATE:    3/3/2021
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 the authors, “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” (Wren et al., 1997, p. 780). Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum at porttitor neque. Nullam dapibus pulvinar hendrerit. Etiam elementum ipsum quis elit aliquet tincidunt. Aliquam dui augue, tempor quis pretium et, fermentum et dolor. Praesent sit amet velit et ligula iaculis vulputate. Nulla facilisi. Aliquam lobortis pulvinar rhoncus. Aliquam neque sem, tincidunt sollicitudin ante gravida, congue pretium odio. Nullam in vestibulum tellus, accumsan dignissim dolor. Sed convallis nisl vel venenatis sagittis. In eu turpis risus. Phasellus ac rhoncus est. [The body should be 500 words long +/- 20 words.]

Reference

Wren, C. R., Azarbayejani, A., Darrell, T., & Pentland, A. P. (1997). Pfinder: Real-time tracking of the human body. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 19(7), 780-785. https://doi.org/10.1109/34.598236

According to the syllabus, the 500-Word Summary project involves the following:

Individual: 500-Word Summary, 10%

Individually, you will write a 500-word summary of a technical or scientific article that demonstrates: 1. ability to identify key processes and concepts in a professional science or technology article. 2. ability to describe complex processes and concepts clearly and concisely. 3. an awareness of audience. The summary should cite the article and any quotes following APA format.

Perform the following steps to begin your project:

First, use the library’s journal databases (navigate to Start Your Research > Find Articles > A/Academic Search Complete or I/IEEE Explore) to find an article of sufficient length (< 4 pages) that focuses on a topic from your major and career. Save the PDF of the article some place safe so that you can easily return to it later.

Second, read the article from start to finish.

Third, write a reverse outline of the article by reading each paragraph again, putting the article away, typing one sentence in your own words summarizing that single paragraph, reading the next paragraph, writing one sentence summarizing it, etc. until the end of the article. Save this reverse outline someplace safe (we will be using it next week), and copy-and-paste it into a comment made to this post (click the title above, “Beginnings 500-Word Summary Project, Week 1” and scroll down to the comment box where you paste your reverse outline and then click “post comment.”).