WID Assignment (Academic Journal or Professional Magazine Article)
The culmination of the so much preparatory work is now at hand! You will write an academic journal, trade journal, or professional magazine article (a minimum 2500 words*, plus a MLA works cited or APA reference page, and at least 10 scholarly sources**) that would be appropriate to be submitted to the target publication that you’ve been working with in the past couple of modules (so, in other words, try your best to imitate the style conventions that you’ve identified in your target publication in your Journal Analysis Paper; for example, a relevant topic, tone, structure/organization, paragraph development, syntax, page design/format, use of images/charts/graphs/etc., etc.).
I encourage you to write about the topic that you worked with for the Annotated Bibliography and to use the sources that you have already read and evaluated as part of that assignment during this module. It will save you a lot of time! Of course, if some slight changes need to be made to your original plan, know that is a normal part of the writing process (your ideas will change and develop the more you work with them). It’s also alright if you ultimately decide not to use one or two of the sources you wrote about in the Annotated Bibliography—so long as you find other relevant scholarly sources to take their place in the paper itself.
You will need to follow your chosen target publication’s basic writing conventions (including tone, sentence style, organizational style, etc.) as well as your discipline’s standards and values for research. Refer to the Journal Analysis paper that you wrote in Module 1 if you need to remind yourself about your publication’s typical or preferred style. You may choose not to follow every writing convention that you observed in the publication but you should do your best to meet the reasonable and applicable expectations of the journal or magazine.
For this assignment, students may follow MLA or APA citation guidelines, whichever is best suited to your discipline (if your discipline doesn’t use any of these styles, pick the one that you’re the most comfortable with between the three options available). I’ll let you choose what’s best for you.
I know simply saying, “Write an article” is pretty vague, but it is intentionally vague. Depending on the discipline and the journal/magazine that you are mimicking, you may end up writing any sort of 6-8 page article (e.g., some form of argument, an analysis, a report … any form of writing that would fit with your chosen publication and that you feel comfortable writing). You have more decisions to make for yourself with this assignment: scary, but liberating! 🙂
This paper itself is worth 25% of your final course grade. It will be evaluated based on the quality of the student’s ideas, organization, writing, and use of research as well as its adherence to the professional publication’s conventions (as described in the student’s Module 1 Journal Analysis paper). Refer to “The WID Paper” assignment in Canvas to see the details of the grading rubric I’ll use.
*The page count will be based on the class format of MLA style: i.e., 12-point, Times New Roman font, double spacing, and 1″ margins. Although you are encouraged to format your article similar to the format of your target publication (for example, you might use multiple columns, single-spacing, size 11 font, include charts/graphs/images, etc.), you need to ensure that your paper length is sufficient based on these measurement standards.
**If you have a good reason to use a “popular” or non-academic source, you may do so but understand that it won’t count towards the 6-source minimum requirement; it will instead be an “extra” source.
