essay english
azim1994Essay: Issues of national/global importance
ENVE – 441
Spring – 2016
Dr. Sudarshan Kurwadkar
Objective
Learn about how to select a good topic?
Resources
Relevancy
Competency and Comfort
State-of-the-art (currently in the news)
Writing an executive summary
Writing style (Persuasive preferred!!!)
Plagiarism (Penalty according to match!)
Essay (5 %) Selecting a good topic…
Resources
May not be peer reviewed
May not be authenticated
Propaganda
Google scholar
Quality of the journal
Peer reviewed
Sci-finder Scholar
Vast resource
Pub-med
May not be able to download
Relevancy
Relevancy can be checked by asking following questions:
Does it relate to environmental engineering (too broad)
Does it relate to EGCE – 441 content (Specific)
How old the paper is?
Is it peer reviewed?
Competency and Comfort
Am I familiar with the subject content?
Will I be able to write comfortably?
What is the scope of the problem? Regional, National or Global?
State-of-the-art
For this class, ”Only papers/reports published between 2011-2016 will be considered”
Older material might be good but may not be related. Might involve old technology.
The data might be outdated
Writing an essay
Maximum, two page summary
Two page (plus any additional pages for references) summary should be written in single space
Two pages of original write-up; additional page for references if needed
Times New Roman font size 12 should be used throughout the summary
References should be cited on separate pages that will not be counted towards the two page limit
Always write in neutral form: Avoid using I, me, she, they.
Do not plagiarize! HEAVY PENALTY (Penalty goes with the match)
Plagiarism! Do we practice…
Writing an essay
When citing someone’s work in the body of the executive summary:
If there are more than two authors then (Fitch, et al., 2009)
If there are only two authors then (Fitch and Adams, 2009)
Citation format should be: Fitch, M. K.; Adams, J. K.; Chamberlain, C.W., (2010). Modeling persistence of insecticides in the environment. Journal of Environmental Engineering, Vol. 7, pp. 817-235
If you cite a website, make sure to include the date on which it was accessed
If you are citing a book, then make sure to include the page numbers, ISBN number and the publisher
Writing an essay
When citing others work, use the following format:
Study conducted by Volker et al. (2009) reported that…
A study on persistence of insecticides in the soil environment by Volker et al. (2009) demonstrated that…
Volker et al. (2009) showed that the persistence is
Fitch and Adams also reported similar observation in their study…
Writing an essay
To critically evaluate the research work of others:
Although the authors proposed an excellent approach to deal with rise in sea level… however, it would have been great if they would have considered….
The authors study suffers from the following weakness…
The authors failed to demonstrate that the model holds its validity under…
The authors did not validate the model
No statistical analysis or the validity of the model was proposed or presented
Writing an essay
Your summary should have a CONTINUITY. Abrupt changes will not be appreciated
I ACTUALLY READ EVERYTHING BEFORE I GRADE!
Writing an essay
No citation will receive -2 point penalty
Only one citation (chosen paper) will receive --2 point penalty
More than five citation will be rewarded +2 points
Essay grading rubric
QUESTIONS
Name of Students Organization
(10 Points)
Clarity
(10 Points)
Confidence
(10 Points)
Quality
(10 Points)
Overall
(10 Points)
TOTAL
(50 Points)