See calendar.
To help you get experience with a particular kind of short writing that you will encounter as a CS professional.
One page (approx. 250 words) + Cover Sheet (for grading)
A serious email message about a professional issue.
Your workgroup on the job as a CS professional, plus your boss.
Use the general CS3604 course resource site for ideas about a topic.
The Virginia Tech honor code is in effect for all work. This means that this writing assignment is to be done alone, without help from someone else. Exceptions: Getting help in your writing from the Writing center is an important exception, and is always encouraged. Further, this application of the honor code is not intended to interfere with the free exchange of ideas and peer assistance that support learning, including general discussions about the assignment and the type of writing involved with other students, the instructor, and/or the GTA.
NOTE about plagiarism: We will be especially zealous in prosecuting Honor Court cases involving plagiarism, especially those where material is taken from other students or from the Web or Internet. Plagiarism of any work from a current or former student in this course is considered to be an honor code violation. Through the use of peer evaluations and collaborative development, and the use of the WWW, there is a strong possibility that you will be exposed to concepts and ideas that you can use in your own work. Getting permission to use those ideas and concepts from the originator (except when it is already in the public domain) and/or giving appropriate acknowledgment in your own work circumvents a charge of plagiarism.
You are to write a serious email message about a professional issue to a colleague whom you don't know very well, with a copy to your boss.
Normally email is one of the least formal forms of professional writing that you will do. Quick messages to friends or coworkers can even be ungrammatical, with spelling errors and typos, and the message gets through. Rarely does informality in an email message result in a poor impression on the part of the recipient.
However, at times your email writing needs to move up a notch in quality and formality. This usually happens when the topic is more serious and when one or more of the recipients is not well known to the sender. This assignment is one of those times.
Here is how to do your assignment. Pretend you are working in some job as a CS professional and make up an issue about ethics or some other aspect of professionalism. See the broader course web site for ideas, if necessary. The issue should be of about medium importance so that an email message is an appropriate way to open it up to discussion. You are to write a message of about 250 words (one page) addressed to one or more coworkers (at least some of which you do not know well) with a copy to your boss, to bring this issue to their attention and perhaps explain an appropriate action and how to take it (I'll give you flexibility to make this fit your issue). The copy will let your boss know you are concerned about this issue, and will let the other recipients know your boss is in the loop.
Be explicit and clear enough about everything in the message content, so we (instructor and GTA, as outsiders) can understand the issue and why you are sending the message to this person or persons. Hint: One way you can do this is to mention the role of that person in the message. Example: "I am sending this to you because of your role as security officer for our department."
It is important that you understand that the term "first draft" here does NOT mean "rough draft". In fact, it is the opposite, the first draft is expected to be the very best writing you can do. The iterative writing process is designed to make your final draft even better. In a one-semester course like this, we have to compress the process from what it would be in the real world, where it is not uncommon for a journal article, for example, to undergo 20 iterations over a period of six months! At least this will follow the spirit of that kind of iterative writing.
Based on what you learn from the grading and any discussion of the first draft, write another (final) draft. Try hard to improve the work in this draft. Proofreader signatures not required for the final draft.
For all assignments with multiple drafts (including this one), always hand in all previous drafts (the marked up copy with the cover sheet, not a newly printed one). Put the latest version on top, with successively older versions behind. We need this to grade you on how you improved with the iteration.