Assignments |
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By the end of this lesson, you should be able to do each of the following without consulting notes or other resources:
Before
coming to class on Monday, you should complete the following assignments: Read “Papers, Reports, and Assignments” in Making
Your Mark. Write another paragraph of the strategies section of your life plan. Our class activities this week include the following: Think Fast: Describe
three effective strategies for completing assignments successfully. Presentations: Assignments
(Professor Canada), Writing Center (Kyle Jackle, Jeff Jerome, Jarrin Josue),
Life Plan Discussion: During
this time, we will discuss the insights and questions that have emerged
during the “Think Fast” exercise and presentations. Think Again: Use
this time to work on your Life Plan and post a draft on the World Wide Web. Conferences: While
the rest of you are working on the “Think Again” exercise, I will meet with
two of you in one-on-one conferences.
During this time, I will review some of your writing, orally quiz you
on lesson objectives, and field your questions. Announcements: We
will wrap up this lesson with announcements regarding upcoming lessons, as
well as other relevant subjects. Make sure you know the meaning and significance of each of the following:
You can pursue
the objectives in this lesson further by consulting the resource listed
below: Be
Your Best: The Easy Way to a Web Site offers step-by-step instructions
for creating and posting a World Wide Web page. Be Your Best:
Research offers
guidance on finding and using sources to complete assignments. Updated September 16, 2002
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IntroductionIn our last two lessons on study skills, we looked at some effective strategies for learning material and taking notes. Using these tools, you can perform well on the tests in your classes. To succeed in many of these classes, however, you also will need to complete out-of-class assignments, such as research papers. In this lesson, we take a look at some strategies that can help you do well on these assignments, as well. I also will show you how to set up your Life Plan as a World Wide Web page and how to post it on the Internet. Bring a diskette with your life plan on it, along with all of your notes, to Dial 149. DiscussionPlanning and Completing AssignmentsYou can dramatically improve your chances of success on writing and other assignments if you take advantage of some effective strategies for planning and completing assignments. Start early. When you begin right away, you lengthen the amount of time you have to write a strong paper. With this extra time, you can stop when you get tired or stuck and come back to it later. Extra time also means you have a better chance of getting interlibrary loan items in time to use them in your paper. Make a schedule. Instead of thinking of a major assignment as a huge project, think of it as a series of manageable stages, such as taking notes, creating an outline, writing a draft, revising this draft, and proofreading. Make a schedule in which you commit yourself to completing each of these stages by a certain date; then, break down each stage further into steps and schedule a specific day and time when you will complete each step. Take notes. Rather than write your research notes by hand, set up an outline in a word-processing program such as Microsoft Word. As you read your sources and review the findings of your interviews or observations, type notes directly into your outline. Each note should appear on a separate line and should be a complete sentence containing a statistic, an anecdote, an observation, a response to a survey or interview, a paraphrase or a quotation of expert testimony, or perhaps another form of evidence. Organize your outline. After you have taken extensive notes on five or more sources, look for patterns among this evidence. For example, you may notice that two statistics, a quotation from a survey respondent, and a paraphrase of a scholarly journal all refer to the same type of support for your claim. Create a heading for this branch of support and move all of the related evidence under this heading. If a piece of information does not support your working claim but rather merely contains a definition or other background material, place it under a heading called "Background." Continue this process until every point is under a heading. Look for ways to combine or divide headings and points so that they occur in bunches of three to five. Read your entire outline and then write a working claim based on the information it contains. At the top of your outline, create a heading called "Introduction" and place this working claim under it. Now read your outline again. Move headings and points until the outline seems relatively logical and well-organized. See the sample outline. Write effective paragraphs. For each point in your outline, write a paragraph. The most important unit in a paper, the paragraph presents organized support for your claim. There is no single way to write an effective paragraph, but I suggest that beginning writers start each paragraph in the body of a paper with a topic sentence, a sentence that both summarizes the material in the paragraph and refers back to the claim to show the reader how this material supports the claim. In other words, a good topic sentence looks both forward and backward. The remaining sentences should support this topic sentence and should appear in a logical order. Again, your outline will guide you. If you have taken thorough, accurate notes in your outline, you can even save yourself a lot of typing by simply cutting and pasting points from your outline into your draft. The sentences in an effective paragraph should be organized according to levels of generality. That is, a paragraph should contain perhaps three to five sentences that are only slightly more specific than the topic sentence; each of these sentences may be followed by other sentences that are even more specific, and so on. Finally, add transition words to indicate connections among the sentences in your paragraph. In this paragraph, for example, I used words and phrases such as "In other words," "Again," and "Finally" to help the reader see the direction of my ideas. Don't give in to writer's block. Because you have typed your notes directly into an outline, you do not have to confront the ugly and terrifying blank page. If you still have trouble getting started, however, you may be worrying too much about minor things such as style and grammar. To free your mind of these distractions and focus on getting a draft done, try writing a "speed draft." Give yourself two uninterrupted hours to write the entire paper. Set an alarm to go off when your time is up. Even better, use a watch that beeps every fifteen minutes or half-hour. Force yourself to produce a complete draft in this time. The finished product will be very rough, of course, but you will have a chunk of material to revise, which is easier to do than to write. ResearchMany assignments require you to conduct research by visiting a library or locating credible information on the Internet. Being familiar with these two sources of information can help you to produce successful assignments. Libraries hold thousands or even millions of print sources: books, periodicals, government documents, and other materials that appear in hard-copy form. Despite the lure of the Internet, experienced researchers know that a good library actually can help them produce better products with less effort. Indeed, once you know your way around the library, you will find writing easier because you can find a lot of thorough, credible information on your subject. The best place to start your research in the library is the reference section, where you can find a variety of subject encyclopedias with useful overviews and definitions. Later, you can move on to monographs and periodicals. Monographs are books and other items that stand alone and do not appear on a regular basis. Periodicals appear periodically, perhaps once a month or four times a year, and generally contain relatively short articles on various subjects. Some of the best-known periodicals are magazines and scholarly journals. You can find both monographs and periodicals by using electronic databases such as BraveCat and EbscoHost. When using these databases, type in key words-that is, words related to your subject--and connect them with Boolean operators, words such as "and" and "or," to narrow or broaden your search. For example, if you want to find articles about the history of billiards in America, you might type "billiards and history and United States." Before you enter the library stacks, where the books are stored, make sure that you understand the Library of Congress cataloging system, which UNCP libraries and other college libraries use to organize their books and other materials. Under this system, each book has a unique call number, such as PS 2638 .P32, in which the first one or two letters indicate the general subject--in this case, American literature. Because libraries put books in alphabetical and numerical order, books about similar subjects generally appear together on the shelves. Thus, whenever you find a book on your subject, look to the left and right of it for other books that may be of use to you. Also, always remember to check a book's bibliography, which is a list of other books and articles on similar subjects. Use the library's online catalog or another database to find these sources, check their bibliographies, and so on. Finally, if you learn about a book or article not available in your library, consider ordering it through interlibrary loan, an inexpensive method of obtaining sources stored in other libraries. The Internet is an international network of computers connected by wires such as telephone lines. Because many people post information on the Internet in the form of World Wide Web sites, it can be a useful research tool. Nevertheless, because the information on the Internet tends to be less credible, less thorough, and somewhat harder to find, you generally should use the Internet only to complement your library research. You can find information on the Internet in four basic ways. First, if possible, try typing in a site's URL, or Web address, directly. If you don't know the address, try guessing. For example, you might guess that the URL for the University of North Carolina is www.uncp.edu, and you would be right. Second, try visiting a subject directory, such as www.looksmart.com, where you an look for subject headings and narrow them down until you find links to Web sites on your subject. A third approach is to use a search engine, a computer program that looks through information on the Web and gives you a list of sites relevant to your interests. When you use the Excite search engine, for example, you type one or more key words into a white box and click on "Search." The next screen to appear will feature links to Web pages related to these words. To visit one, click on one of the links and write down the URL for future reference. Finally, once you reach a Web site on your subject, click on its links, which probably will lead you to other Web sites related to your subject. ConclusionIn this lesson, we have discussed various strategies that can help you produce successful assignments. In our next lesson, we will discuss various kinds of exams and methods for succeeding on them. |