Continuing 500-Word Summary Project, Peer Review, Week 3

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.

Announcement: WAC Workshop on Plagiarism, Thurs., Feb. 18, 1-2pm

City Tech’s Writing Across the Curriculum program is offering a free workshop on what is plagiarism and how to avoid it. This is highly recommended but not required (we will be talking about plagiarism throughout the semester, too). Details are below:

Avoiding Plagiarism: A Workshop for Students

Plagiarism can be less obvious than you think, especially in an online environment. This workshop will give you practical information and strategies to ensure your writing assignments are plagiarism-free.
 
When: Thurs, Feb 18, 2021, 1-2 pm
Where: Zoom 
 
Students register in advance for this workshop:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYlcuisqDwiGdCAM6NjOX1bx7qOGExOV-wa
 
After registering, a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting will be sent.

Lecture, Week 2

Greetings, all! Here’s the lecture for the second week of Technical Writing. In this week’s lecture, I review some points about the class and syllabus, discuss what is technical writing, and show you how to transform your reverse outline into the first draft of your 500-Word Summary project. While you watch this week’s lecture, remember to have your notebook out to write notes. Then, scroll down and complete the Weekly Writing Assignment and 500-Word Summary homework described in the two posts below.

Remember, I will have office hours on Wednesday from 3:00pm-5:00pm (the link to the Google Hangout is at the top of the syllabus). Also, you can email me at jellis at citytech.cuny.edu with your questions or to make an appointment to meet with me at another time.

Be well and stay safe!

Weekly Writing Assignment, Week 2

For this week’s Weekly Writing Assignment, I would like you to write at least 250 words the describes (1) how you selected the article that you did for the 500-word summary including details, such as which databases you used, what keyword(s) you used, and what criteria you used to focus on some articles and not others; and (2) a set of instructions that someone else could use to find the specific article that you selected, which can be a description of steps in sentences or a list of steps: 1, 2, 3, etc.

Watch this week’s lecture above for a full description of this assignment before completing it.

Type your response into your word process of choice and save your work some place safe. Then, click on the title of this post above (“Weekly Writing Assignment, Week 2”), scroll down to the comment box, copy-and-paste your response from your word processor into the comment box, and click “Post comment.”

Continuing 500-Word Summary, Week 2

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

Lecture, Week 1

Above you’ll find the first lecture of our Spring 2021 Technical Writing class. It’s important that you watch it in its entirety with a notebook out so that you may make notes and maintain engagement through the activity of note taking.

This week’s lecture is longer than most, because there is a lot of material for us to cover this first week. It includes introductions, syllabus review, writing and studying skills review, and a discussion of the first assignments.

After viewing the lecture, scroll down to see this week’s assignments–the first Weekly Writing Assignment and homework for the first project, the 500-Word Summary.

Stop by my office hours on Wednesday between 3:00-5:00pm or email me with questions at jellis at citytech.cuny.edu.

Weekly Writing Assignment, Week 1

For this week’s Weekly Writing assignment, I would like you to send me an email that follows these parameters:

  • Send an email to Prof. Ellis at jellis at citytech.cuny.edu from your City Tech email account.
  • Refer to this medium.com article for advice on best practices when emailing a professor.
  • Subject line: ENG2575 OL88 Student Introduction
  • Salutation
  • Body: Tell me about yourself, your major, career goals, hobbies, what you want to get out of our class, and your day and time availability when you might be able to work with your team of students in class.
  • Closing: Sign with your name or how you would like me to refer to you.
  • If you need to reset your email password, visit: forgot.citytech.cuny.edu.

Beginning 500-Word Summary Project, Week 1

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.”).

Welcome to Technical Writing!

Dear all,

I would like to welcome you to our Spring 2021 Technical Writing class! To make sure you’re in the right place, this is ENG2575 OL88. I am Prof. Ellis and I will be leading our class this semester.

It’s important that you read through this message carefully and follow my directions below to join our class on OpenLab.

Even though classes don’t begin until Friday, January 29, the school asked faculty to reach out to students early to help everyone acclimate to distance education. At any point, feel free to reach out to me by email with any questions that you might have.

Our class is completely online this semester and we will not be meeting synchronously (meaning at the same time). Instead, our class is designated asynchronous, which means each student can watch lectures and do the work at times of their choosing as long as deadlines are met. There are, however, required projects in which students will have to collaborate with others and coordinate times to work together.

We will be using City Tech’s OpenLab to coordinate our class and the work that you will be doing this semester. To get you setup with the OpenLab, you will need to create an account using your City Tech email address (if you haven’t already done so), which you can do here: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/register/

After you login to OpenLab with your account, you need to visit the Profile Page of our class and click on “Join Now” on the left side under the avatar of a red painting of a figure pointing to the right: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/groups/eng2575-ol88-technical-writing-spring-2021/

Then, to access our class site where I will post lectures and assignments, and you will turn in many of your projects in the class, click on “Visit Course Site” after you joined the course, or you can go there directly by following this link: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/elliseng2575ol88sp2021/

On our Course Site, you will see this Welcome message from me at the top of the page. Before Wednesday, February 4, I will post the first lecture video and weekly writing assignment. I explain a lot about how the class works and what we will be doing in that video. It is imperative that you watch each video lecture completely and have a notebook out to take notes in during the lecture.

Also, look at the menu on the left side of our Course Site to find the link to the class Syllabus: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/elliseng2575ol88sp2021/syllabus/. All of our class’ policies, major assignments and grades, and schedule can be found there. I go over the syllabus in detail in the first lecture video.

Finally, I will hold weekly virtual office hours on Wednesday from 3:00pm-5:00pm on Google Hangouts here: https://hangouts.google.com/call/ffqYdoXngPvd-4OB-HTtACEE. I will post a link to Google Hangouts on our Course Site each week, too. If you would like to meet with me at a different day and time, please send me an email with your availability for the coming week and we can arrange a time that works for both of our schedules.

I’m looking forward to working with you all over the fall semester. Remember to contact me with questions or if anything comes up that affects your performance in the class at jellis@citytech.cuny.edu. I want us all to complete the semester successfully!

Be well and stay safe!

Best, Professor Ellis