To:
ESRM
301 Students
From: Jim Fridley
Subject: Recent
Date:
January 17, 2007
I’ve enjoyed
reading your first
couple of Reading Reports. Some comments
follow. I hope you find them helpful.
I grade them (and
we will continue
to grade them) on a ten point scale:
The grades will
appear on the
top of your papers as x/y/z (e.g. 2/4/3).
The first two weeks I was very relaxed in my assignment of
scores but I’m
raising my expectations now that you’ve done a couple of them.
For your future Reading Reports be sure to ask yourself:
Remember that the
purpose of
the Reading Report is solely to report on the assigned reading in light
of the
question/prompt. We expect that you will
be answering the prompt/question only from the assigned reading. Perhaps it will be helpful for you to imagine
that, as an employee in some organization, you have been handed one or
more
items to read and report back on what the author(s) had to say about
one or two
specific question or concerns. Furthermore,
imagine that your supervisor will be using your responses to help write
the
literature review section in some upcoming report or proposal.
Also remember that
the Reading
Reports must be submitted in the format that was described in the
Course Policy
document.
On the use of
citations:
An ability
to write reports, briefs, memorandums and so on, that are based on
published or
presented material as well as things like interviews and conversations
is
important and valuable for a huge number of activities (like jobs) in
environmental and natural resources related organizations.
Key is being able to explain ideas that came
from somebody else (or their work) very accurately and concisely and
without
leading to confusion about which ideas actually belong to you and which
don’t. Therefore
carefully citing other peoples’ ideas is critically important. We have decided to require that you use the
CBE style and we prefer the name-date system of in-text citation. You may use the citation(numbered)-sequence
system
though if you prefer (it makes sense to do so on the Reading Reports
since you
will frequently be citing one or two authors over and over).
So, be sure that
you use the
CBE style correctly, cite every article that has been listed as
required
reading, and are careful to (1) use the citations to point out, as much
as
possible, everything the author has to say that is relevant to the
prompt and
(2) not leave concepts or ideas that were garnered from the reading
looking
like they are "general knowledge" or "widely used terms or
phrases" if in fact you got them from the author.
Please peruse the
information
found at the two websites below. I
strongly urge you to take the time to study the pages on “quoting and
paraphrasing sources” on the
UW Libraries CBE
Style Guide: http://www.lib.washington.edu/help/guides/42CBE.pdf
University of
Lastly, I’ve linked a student
paper (anonymous and with permission) that might help you to visualize
the answer to the question “so what does he really want?”
Have a look at it and ask me if you are still wondering.
Take care and happy
writing,
Jim