Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Hello students! Welcome to ENGL 341!

This semester in Technical Writing, ENGL 341, you will be working on your writing with the specific goal of focusing on audience. Given your increasing expertise in your area of study, and your increasing fluency in the disciplinary and "specialist" language of that field, it is important now that you begin working towards presenting technical information clearly and comprehensibly for non-expert audiences. That is the primary goal of this course.

Also, I want you to already begin thinking about our final project in this class: a technical report of fifteen or more pages. The main thing you need to start thinking about now is the "primary research"part of this project; this is research in which you are engaged, as an investigator, an observer, a data-compiler or -calculator, an interviewer, or an experimenter. The "primary" part is what you need to think about now. With what kinds of research projects in your major field of study are you involved?

If you are involved in a research project, tell me and your classmates a little bit about it in your comment here. Remember, we're not all experts in the same areas, so be sure you are presenting your research project in terms comprehensible to the largest number of us -- your audience. If you are not involved in a research project, start thinking about what kinds of "primary research" you might be able to begin in the next nine weeks.

15 comments:

  1. There are a variety of ways to perform primary research. For instance, I could do primary research by way of observation. Since I am a chemistry student, I would observe what Dr. Heagy’s (a chemistry professor) graduate students are doing. Then I would write about it. If I did not understand a procedure I could ask the graduate student to explain the procedure to me. Or I could go around interviewing chemistry professors about there research. Since I am in the chemistry club I may be able to write about the demonstrations we put on for the elementary students.

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  3. Primary research is critical to a project like this. I am lucky to have done a lot of research already being on a research project through Tech. I am excited to get a paper done on the subject in hopes of getting it published. I suppose for now I will just give a brief background. The Oil industry uses shaped explosive charges to penetrate rock formations in order for crude oil to flow. My research is attempting to increase the damage done by the shaped charges using reactive metals. A reactive metal is a complex reaction that happens between a metal and metal oxide. These reactions produce incredible amounts of heat and gas. The theory is that this heat and gas will make penetrations larger allowing more oil to flow.

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  4. I have my first meeting for my Junior Design group Monday afternoon so I will know more then, but I have also done research with Dr. Kalugin in the materials department on single and multi-layer graphene. It is a very interesting emerging field in nanotechnology, we have submitted a paper to a journal and hope it will be published soon.

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  5. I did some research in the field of bio-fuels over last summer. This research covered algae specifically as an alternative fuel source. This, I think, would be a good research topic.

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  6. I'm currently in my second semester of senior design. We're working on designing and building a new lightning interferometer for Dr. Rison. In the 80's, Langmuir built an interferrometer to study lightning phenomenon by analying the radio frequency (RF) radiation produced during formation of lightning channels. However, this is system is outdated and Dr. Rison would like a redesigned, cutting edge system.

    While our design is based on the previous system, we are researching a more effective method lightning detection using semi-wideband interferometry. We are also using a method of detection similar to the method used by the VLA.

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  7. I am not currently doing any research. However, I am speaking with one of my instructors about participating in his research on large wireless sensor networks. Networks that could monitor someones vitals sign remotely or retrieve data from a moving data source.

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  8. I'll be in a research project for my junior design class this afternoon. Aside from that I've done reasearch on topics for english classes. Reasearch had to be done for a couple of group presentations for one of Dr. Zeeman's classes and the reasearch paper for english 112.

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  9. Not doing any research projects at the moment aside from junior design this semester (does this even count?). We're basically tasked with making a semi-intelligent battery charger, and hopefully we'll not slack off and be finished not too late after the semester. :)

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  10. I'm not involved in any research projects as of right now. I plan to use my environmental microbiology lab as a starting point for the project that will be done in this class. Unfortunately, my lab doesn't start until tomorrow, so I don't know any details right now.

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  11. For my primary research, I plan to observe (and hopefully be involved with) one of the junior or senior design teams. Using that research, data, and results, I will write my final paper.

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  12. I just had my first meeting with my project team to discuss project ideas for the semester project in Software Engineering. The most popular candidates include a secure web server or a web application to improve upon and ultimately replace the NMT Banweb system.

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  13. I am currently working on a project to attach fatty acid tails to podophyllotoxin, a promising chemotherapy drug. I work for the chemistry department. Remember my presentation?

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  14. My primary research involved growing plants in a controlled environment. Then I measured physical aspects of the plants and compared to plants grown in slightly different conditions.

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  15. A little late to say what kind of project I worked on. But dating back to when this blog was published,

    I was involved in a statistical simulations project with a group of math students but after some issues the project never happened. As a result I found myself having to manufacture my own project with my own limited resources. So I was playing darts in my friends garage stressing at what kind of project I would do. Contemplating my future in this class I was having a discussion with my friend who is a math major at Adams State University and after a heated discussion about the statistics of a game of darts, it occurred to me that this would be a perfect project. The dart experiment could draw elements of raw experimentation, research, and mathematically relevant results. So I got out a notepad and got to work!

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