CGTC Report Genre and Research Paper

Kruschek Spring 2022 LMC 3403Report Genre and Research
Due Date
4/14: Genre and Research Write-up Due by 11:59pm via Canvas
Activity
This week you will be learning about internal reports, specifically recommendation reports, and
start researching for your final major assignment. Internal reports are used more often than
external ones, but the distinction is that an internal report is meant to be used within an
organization rather than shared among a larger, public audience. Once you’ve finished this
activity, you can begin drafting a researched recommendation report on the pros and cons of
telecommuting, i.e. working from home, using what you know about reports and the research
you have done.
Report Genre Analysis: Half to one page, single spaced. In lieu of a reading quiz, please
summarize what you consider the most important parts of the readings this week on reports.
Return to any previous lectures/transcripts for elements of other genres that I regularly discuss,
i.e. format, content organization, best practices, etc. Your summary should have minimal
quotes, full sentences, and multiple paragraphs as needed. For this activity, I’m looking for
evidence that you understand how to “read” a genre and understand what it does rather than
what the content says.
Research Write-up: One to one-and-a-half pages, single spaced, of five publicly available
sources, meaning sources that are available to the general public and not kept behind a
paywall, about telecommuting/working from home. This portion of the activity will be similar to
an annotated bibliography. If you’re not familiar, an annotated bibliography is simply a way of
organizing research at varying levels of formality depending upon the context. For the purposes
of our class, your research write-up will be fairly informal and consist of brief summaries of five
publicly available sources and a brief discussion on how you might use each source in your
report.
I’m guessing many of you are familiar with what telecommuting is by now because, pandemic.
However, you may not be aware of how the business sector viewed working from home before
the pandemic or how they and perhaps their employees might view it now. That means you may
(read: will) have to find/skim more than five sources to get the gist of the conversation. It’s
unlikely that the first five sources you find will magically be the most useful, insightful, credible,
and/or up to date out there. That’s a normal part of the research process; keep digging and
keep track of everything you find before whittling down your list to just five to complete this
activity. You may eventually end up using all five sources in your report, you may only use
some, you may use all you’ve found and more as you complete the larger assignment. Again,
this is all a very normal part of the research process.
Format-wise, the sources you decide to include in your write-up should be listed in alphabetical
order by author’s last name or publication if no author is credited, a link to the source, and two
short paragraphs. You do not have to create formal citations for your sources. The first
paragraph will be only a summary of the source and the second will be your plan for how to use
this in the report. In this second paragraph, you can include things like whether this source is
useful for making a pro or con argument, if the author cites other sources, if it’s relevant for the
working world post-pandemic, and/or anything else that might be helpful when you begin writing
the report next week. Again, these can be short paragraphs and ultimately should be useful for
you and your understanding of the issue (telecommuting). Each source and pair of paragraphs
should be single spaced with a double space between sources and paragraphs, just like how
this document is formatted.