Question: Your topic for your report is a concept (an idea or a term) that you understand well but that is probably unfamiliar to most other members of the class. Choose a topic from your field of study, from a job, or from your personal interests.
- You should be enough of an expert to make research unnecessary. However, if you do choose to add information from outside your personal experience, it should take up not more than 10% of your document. All words, ideas, or organization of material not your own must be scrupulously documented in MLA or APA style.
- However, most important to the kind of informal, reader-friendly documentation required in this course is that you mention the name of the person or organization that originated the information and the title of the document before you use it. Canvas automatically submits drafts of writings in this course to Turnitin for a color-coded report on words and phrases that are not original to you, so please take care to submit only you own, original writing.
- Recent successful topics in this course include Avalanche transceivers, How to become a Project Management professional, Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), An explanation of the term "Metadata," The parenting strategy "Magic 1-2-3," and What a Litigation Auditor Does.
- Others we've seen recently are on How to install anti-virus protection, How to choose a mattress, and Jazzercise.
- Any topic you can explain well should work well. You'll use this same topic for your Weeks 5-6 slide set.
- This week, draft only your introduction and your list of main section headings. Here's a sample(Attached) of the introductory document you need to post this week. I've labeled the parts of it that you may have noticed in all of the sample reports we discussed in Week 1.
- In your introduction: Find a way to make your topic relevant and interesting to readers outside your field
- Reveal your credentials for reporting on the topic to encourage our interest
- Use block paragraphing (single spacing, no indentation of first lines of paragraphs, an empty line between paragraphs)
- Lead logically and gracefully into your list of main section headings
- Create a parallel list of your main section headings
- Keep your section headings concise and clear
- Use readability statistics to make sure you're writing Plain Language.