ECE 340 - Trade journal article

Why is a large writing task part of an electronics course?

Much of your professional time will be spent reading articles, datasheets, and other documents related to your “real” job. These documents are also written by engineers in your same discipline.

You will be given a selection of (links to) articles from industry publications. These are good examples of the topic, scope, and audience that is expected for your writing.

You will also search for and read more articles in topics that you find interesting. This will form the basis for selecting a topic to research further in preparation for writing. These tasks will happen throughout the semester, but will be mostly completed in the first four weeks.

The second phase of the project is selecting a topic for your article that is both personally interesting and of appropriate scope. The specific topic will be chosen from a suggestion list in collaboration with the instructor.

The example articles serve as your guide to identifying the type of information needed. It also provides a general outline for the structure of your article. This is a great help to direct your research.

At this point in your education, you are likely familiar with the deja vu feeling when searching for specific information about a topic. Read enough of the search results while paying attention to dates and you can begin to trace the flow of information from only a few truly valuable sources of information to the may articles that merely parrot (with citations or not, sadly) that information.

Submit an outline of your article which reflects the structure of your article. It should have at least one sentence that stands in for what will be a paragraph in the final article. This should almost read like an ultra-compact version of your paper but presented as a hierarchical list.

This is a complete article which covers all of your intended content. It should not include placeholders for future content (this was the purpose of the outline).

It is best to write individual paragraphs and worry about assembling together into a cohesive story after the draft.

You have identified parts of your article that would benefit from a figure, schematic, or picture --- a good figure makes writing around it much easier! Too many figures indicate that you should narrow your topic a little to focus on a smaller or more specific idea, leaving the other things for a future article.

Your instructor will review this draft using the rubric below. They will also provide you with higher-level comments about the structure or other information an article about your topic should include.

Attach your first draft which instructor comments. Write a brief memorandum that describes how your new draft addresses those comments. This draft (without instructor comments) will then be reviewed by several of your peers. Feedback from this round of editing will be incorporated into your final article.

You will be assigned 3-4 2 articles written by your peers. Similar to the instructor comments, you will review the papers for appropriate audience, discussion structure, and consistend use of language mechanics.

The quality of your review will be scored in this phase using a rubric filled out by the article author.

Incorporate the feedback received from the peer review process into a final version of your article.

Attach a short memorandum describing the changes you made or a justification why some changes were not made.

Excellent articles may be submitted to an appropriate trade publication for consideration for publishing.