Project One: Annotations on a Journal in Professional Writing

• Timeline: Weeks
• Due Date:February 22nd [Electronic Submission]
• Deliverables:6-8 annotations arranged according to MLA standards. One paper of approximately 750 words which characterizes the kinds of research that takes place in your journal.

Description:
Our first step in your entry into professional writing will be to familiarize you with a major peer-reviewed research journal in our field. I will ask you to read six articles from this journal published over the last two years. For each article, you will write an annotation- a brief summary of the piece that highlights its central argument, methods and evidence, and conclusions. Annotations should be one to three paragraphs; the point is concision- learning to reduce a lot of information into a brief description.

I will expect you to post all annotations to your blog. I will be monitoring your progress. Please remember that you will need to read and annotate two to three articles a week to complete this assignment on time.

Your research will culminate into a three to five page report on the journal. What characterizes its scholarship? What do people write about? What kinds of research methods do they use? You will have to find a way to categorize and synthesize the research you have conducted. Remember that this is a research methods course, so that's where your focus should lie.

Also, remember that annotations tend to be objective- you don't want to be critical in your annotations (although you can imply criticism, for instance "uses a sample of only 40 respondents." Your paper, however, is another matter. Here, you should construct some kind of evaluative argument. While it might not be as simple as "this is [not] a quality journal because..." that might not be a bad place to start. Eventually, you want your final draft to say something more definitive (ie, Rhetoric Review focuses on providing close readings of texts in order to demonstrate how classical and contemporary rhetorical tropes get deployed effectively.). This might not be something you can do on a first draft, often times I can't write with this kind of control / awareness until a few drafts down the road.

However you structure your paper, make sure you address what you believe the strengths and the weaknesses of the journal are.

Project Two: Primary Research Plan

Our second project, designed by Jennifer Bay, works to familiarize you with the policies and procedures concerned with primary research. You will identify a research problem, design a research agenda, and complete the laborious institutional forms that correspond to human subjects research.

• Timeline: Weeks 4-8 Weeks
• Due Date:February 26th
• Deliverables:
  • A completed full application for the use of Human Research Subjects (the application form is available from Purdue's Center for Human Subjects.)
  • A completed design of three of the following research methods:
    • Focus Group: this document will provide a scenario and a series of questions related to your research question for a session with a focus group.
    • Surveys / Questionnaire: this document will include a questionnaire on your research question, complete with specific instructions.
    • Interview: this document will consist of a description of the interview scenario and a set of questions about your research question that you might ask to an expert.
    • Usability Study: this document will consist of a description of a usability study scenario and a set of specific tasks that you might ask users to undertake.

Description:
For the Annotation Project, you learned more about the field of professional writing by researching journals and publications within the field. Project #2 asks you to go further and develop a research question that emerges from that preliminary work—a question for which you might find answers through primary research. If you remember, primary research is research conducted using original sources; usually, this refers to people. While we will not be interacting with actual human subjects, you will develop a set of materials that might be used if you were to engage in primary research on users (we are not actually interacting with human subjects due to our physical and temporal constraints). The result will be a set of materials that could be distributed to a particular group of people to address your research question.

Your research question needs to be related to professional writing. Topics that might produce an appropriate research question include: a specific technology used in professional writing; a current issue, problem, or innovation in the field; academic and industry relations; career issues; effective techniques and tools; crises in the field; relationships with other disciplines; international perspectives; et cetera. You will probably want to use the heuristic found in our textbook to develop an effective question to guide your research.

Research Narrative:
The following criteria comes from Purdue's IRB application form. If you want more information, then feel free to download the form and look over the "application narrative" sections. Your 2-5 page paper needs to provide a rationale for and overview of your research project. By rationale, I mean you need to explain why you are conducting the study, why such research is needed, and clearly state the intended research question.

You'll also want to spend particular time discussing your research population and to justify why this population fits your research agenda. Be as detailed as possible. Discuss how you will attract subjects, how much of their time and energy you will require, how you will protect their anonymity (if necessary), describe any compensation subjects might receive and [important] provide numbers for all stages of your research.

Finally, you need to discuss how you believe your various primary research choices are suitable to your study. Furthermore, you need to explain how you will analyze/interpret your data and why these methods are proper and potentially meaningful/persuasive.

Projects 3 and 4: Wikipedia and Britannica

Ted Williams High School faces an upcoming budget crunch. Funds are so tight that the school board has requested an investigation into whether they can replace their print based encyclopedias with Wikipedia. Santos Inc. research has accepted a contract to investigate the matter and deployed five independent research teams to investigate the matter. Our work will be modeled on the (in)famous Nature article comparing Wikipedia and Britannica.

This project will require team members to collect and synthesize a plethora of data; I expect each group member to contribute 8 to 10 sources, half of which should be books. For many of you, this will mean learning how to read books in a different way than you might be accustomed to: index, index, index. You will also want to scour bibliographies of every book you look at for sources: better sources, better sources, better sources. Don’t be afraid to stray from your original list.

You will need to use our Drupal site to communicate with each other (I will set up a forum space for you to share your annotations with your group). I will ask you to draft all of your documents using Google Docs (this allows for multiple users to check out and edit a single document). Teamwork will be essential to making this project work (since there is just waaaaaay too much work for one or two people to do).

Your deadlines are as follows:

End of class on March 6th: Research Plan
Each group will produce a research plan that out lays the first 25-30 sources the group will examine. This working bibliography should be accompanied by a one page, single-spaced research agenda that highlights any initial discrepancies between Wikipedia and Britannica and articulates the research agenda (what do you initially think you need to look into to properly assess the accuracy of these entries?).

As your research progresses, I’ll expect you to add additional sources to this list (remember our final number is 8 to 10 per group member). When you hand in your final research project (April 8th), this bibliography should be an annotated bibliography. Remember to annotate with a purpose: your annotations should attempt to summarize the piece in a sentence or two, but should quickly focus themselves on your research agenda.

In class on March 25th: Research Update
On the 25th, every group will be expected to give a 10-15 minute presentation on their progress. This amounts to a 5-7 page paper (double-spaced, it usually takes two minutes to read one double-spaced page) with corresponding multimedia element. Your presentation should spend about a minute providing us with context (what are you looking at? What are the major issues?) and then provide us specifics. Think: nerd show and tell (my presentation on Wikipedia might serve as a model).

In class on April 1st: Research Project Peer Review
On April 1st, you should bring 4 copies of your final research recommendation to class. This paper should highlight:

• any errors or controversies with the Britannica entry
• any errors or controversies the Wikipedia entry
• information unique to the Britannica entry
• information unique to the Wikipedia entry

You will likely need to create some kind of comparative analytic to assess what constitutes an error and discuss such criteria in your paper. Our peer review that day will be pretty straightforward: does this paper have an argument? Does it make sense? Does it contextualize its evidence?

End of class April 8th: Complete Research Project
Full annotated bibliography and research recommendation due in APA format.

April 22nd and 24th: Wikipedia Recommendation Presentations
This time each group will have 20-25 minutes to give a presentation. We will do two presentations on Tuesday and three on Thursday. We will have to stay late on Thursday. Payback: there is no mandatory final project. I will provide an optional final project (creating a professional homepage and portfolio) later in the semester.