Assignments
This page includes assignments and activities related to Writing in Professions and writing about the disciplines.
Career Exploration
This paper asks students to look at their intended career and discuss two major issues within the field and the commonplaces that people in the field hold. One of the outcomes of this paper include experience using the citation style of the field and a basic understanding of what people in the field think about and do.
This type of assignment is especially useful to students who aren't sure about their major and need to dive deeper into the realities of the field in order to decide on a discipline.
Genre Analysis
Genres can be confusing to students who are used to researching solely online where most sources appear to be the same type--online! Through analyzing genres such as scholarly journals, trade journals, and popular magazines, students learn to differentiate between types of online (or print) sources in order to learn about the credibility of the sources and how they might be used in their research endeavors.
Annotated Bibliography
What is an annotated bibliography?
- Video: Complete Guide to Writing an AB, Part 1 (5:46)
- Watch both videos.
- Take bullet-point notes during/after each video (or we may watch in class & take notes together).
- Using your notes, write one paragraph about the main points of each of the videos.
- What questions are you left with?
- Guide to what goes in the bibliographic entry:https://style.mla.org/works-cited/works-cited-a-quick-guide/
Focused Research Paper
Earlier in the semester, students did research in which they explored their careers. In this assignment, students can take one issue they discussed in that early paper and dive deeper into it to develop a more nuanced view of the topic. There are many variations on this assignment; at its core it is a research paper dealing with an issue in the student's discipline in which the goal is for the student to make some sort of recommendation about the issue.