Week 8

In this week's lecture the conversation was about report and paper writing. A report has to do with: a) presenting all the information that you found concerning a topic and at the end of it you can also recommend something concerning this topic, for example: how this product can be better, or what you think that this company should change etc b) you write something and you present it for a specific reason and for a specific audience c) you write something in order to keep a record of it. (Cottrell)

We also talked about two (2) parts of writing which are the following ones:
a) the ones that take part before you start writing and b) the ones that take part in order to help you start writing about the topic that you have chosen.(Crouch)

The tasks that take part before you start the writing process are the following ones:
1) to define the purpose: understand the reason that you want to write this report, what do you want to do with this report? do you want to inform/persuade/entertain? there must be a reason!
2)know your audience: you need to have an understanding of your audience and ofcourse their knowledge!
3) preparation stage: in this step you start searching for your topic and you collect a variety of previous written works. at that time you also write an outline which is something like a guide in order to help you in the next process. (Crouch)
An outline is something like a miniature representation of your work but with keywords or fewer words that will help you remember what you want to write in the actual paper!

Then.... comes the writing process in which you have to write the actual paper. You paraphraze, quote, cite resources, re-arrange the structure of the paragraphs or maybe thinking of removing a resource. But... you may have to re-write this paper again as you may find later on that something is missing or that something you added recently isn't that relevant.(Cottrell)

This lecture was important as it showed the structure of a paper in various stages. Every step of it was presented in a very analytical and helpful manner. In my previous studies we used to write different kinds of papers in every semester and i have an understanding of how a project looks like but again it's been a year since I finished my studies so this lecture came as a reminder of a project's structure. During my previous studies in few classes and especially in the public speaking one we had to write outlines of our upcoming speeches(it was a class that outline was introduced) . Sometimes it was not that easy for me to make this outline as i didn't know at that time what i would possibly want to write at that specific paragraph...i thought that ok i may write something now but tomorrow i may change my mind and the bad thing was that we had to give to the instructor the outline so we had to follow everything we wrote there in the exact order. I used this method twice or three times and then i came back to what i always do, meaning that i collect information about my topic, then i see what is relevant and what's not and then i start by writing down about this topic but without having any pre-planned outline of my future project. Now during this week's discussion concerning outlines i realized that it is a good way to write better your project so i will give again a try of it in projects that require more work.