Essay Four: Research Assignment
A breakdown of the Research Assignments 4 parts
Part 1 Pre-Writing: Develop research questions and gather data.
You can use any of the tools we’ve explored during the semester to investigate statistics and generate visualizations for use in your paper. Consider Policy Map or Excel’s explore options to do some exploratory writing on a topic of your interest.
Write a brief paragraph, or abstract, where you explain succinctly what you hope to accomplish with this project.
Part 2 Analyze: 5 pages.
For this assignment, you will be drafting a PERSUASIVE message to the heads of an organization. A few things must be clear:
• The Organization you are writing to
• The Issue (Including all its details)
• Your proposed resolution.
This piece of writing should be a 5 page persuasive article. It should include some research and statement of statistics proving your point. It should be concise, informational and directed towards your intended audience. It’s very important that you have an actionable argument.
Students who have succeeded on this assignment have chosen topics they were already passionate about: Increased diversity at company xyz, healthier and more transparent food options at SHU, convincing company xyz to stop donating to certain initiatives or engaging in certain behaviors, setting up scholarships for specific social groups, etc.
It should be something you already think about. This will help you begin strongly with some sense of the topic.
Part 3 Writing Meta-cognitively: 1 Page
One of the most important skills you’ll learn in this class is Meta-Cognitive writing. That is, the ability to analyze and assess one’s own writing process and production.
Please answer the following to guide this Meta-Cognition:
How did you plan for composing this message? What types of research did you do? Did you try to consider the opposition? Did you consider why your point of view might not be feasible?
What steps did you take to improve the tone? What would you say is the tone of your message? How is this tone constructed to recognize the audience?
How is the message organized? Does it follow a logical organization that you could readily explain?
How is the document designed? Is there a way to improve clarity by changing this design? What options could you consider?
