Sleep Disorder
Written Project
This paper will be about 6 pages long, typed, doubled-spaced and in 12 font (about 1800 words). For this paper, you need to imagine that you are writing a science news or feature article for publication in the science section of the newspaper. If you want to see a model, find the New York Times or the Boston Globe on any Tuesday and look at the science section. The written project is due at the beginning of class on the due date and MUST be uploaded to Blackboard as an MS Word document or in rich text format (.rtf); no late work is accepted.
Note: The one big difference between your paper and a real article in the newspaper is that newspaper articles do not use bibliographic citation.
Steps
Step 1: Convince your “editor”
If you were going to write an article for the newspaper, you would need to convince your editor that this was an article that he/she might want to publish. In this case, I am your editor.
Step 2: Fill in the background
You may not know much about your topic (reporters often do not). Reading broadly will help. You can fish around on the web. You might do better to go to the library and look in some general sources like textbooks, handbooks, etc. As ever, the librarians can help. Again, this is a good reason to sign up for a library workshop.
Step 3: Write an interesting and readable six-page paper
The paper needs to have the following components (organization is up to you).
1. A good “lead”: You need to draw your readers into the article. Why should they read about this topic There are lots of other articles in the paper.
2. Background: There is no guarantee that your readers (i.e., your Instructor) will know anything about this topic. Be sure to educate the reader
3. News: What is the news here What specific nugget of information makes this worth space in the paper Note: That might come from some article other than the article that got you started.
4. Bibliography: The listing of the works that you used.