Assignment Instructions
In Unit 2, you examined some well-written business reports, academic journal articles, and blog posts. For your Unit 4 Assignment, you will practice applying what you learned about writing effectively to craft your own 3-4 paragraph, personal expression blog post aimed at helping others to address a problem.
As you probably know, a blog or web log is a generally informal online journal written by either individuals or groups. As Caroline Forsey notes, blogs can provide individuals a powerful (and often very profitable) platform for sharing knowledge, while also providing companies with a valuable venue for sharing information:
What Is a Blog, & Why Should You Create One
You won’t need to worry about building a website or creating the actual physical blog site itself for this assignment. Instead, you will be writing the text you would share with your audience on your specific blog post, if you were to create one.
The post you create should be written to an audience of nonprofessionals (for example, working mothers going back to school) to help them deal with a specific problem that you have experience with and have yourself learned to solve, deal with or address. Write to this audience to share your experience, connect with them, and offer them guidance. Demonstrate to them one specific way of solving the problem, based on your own successful experience with this problem.
Because you want to continue to learn about and explore issues relevant to your field of study, be sure that the problem that you address is in some way connected to your field of study. If you are studying psychology, think of your experiences with grief, anxiety, or any other experience where your psychological well-being was affected. You could write to a group of other working parents who are struggling with helping their teenager to fit in or who may be dealing with bullying or depression, if you too have had experience with this issue. If you are studying accounting, you could write to other single mothers out there struggling with their budget, if that is an issue you have dealt with and that you have learned to manage.
Remember, use the writing process itself to help you to brainstorm a possible topic, identify your target audience and main point about the topic, to organize your thoughts and draft them, then to revise ideas after receiving feedback from others, followed by editing and proofreading. We will work through each of these steps, both in seminar and the Unit 3 and 4 Discussion Board, to ensure that you are successful at every step of the process. Here are the steps you will take to ensure success in this assignment:
You may use one source, briefly, and only to establish the relevance of the problem, for example. Your suggestion, solution, or way of dealing with this problem must come from your own experience. If you summarize or use the exact words of a source, you must credit that source with an in-text citation and a References page citation.
Your final dropbox submission should follow APA format.
STEPS TO CREATING YOUR BLOG POST:
- Unit 3 Discussion Board and Seminar: Brainstorming and selecting a topic; identifying your audience, main point and purpose and creating a plan.
- Unit 4 Discussion Board: Implementing your writing plan and writing a rough draft; giving and receiving feedback; creating a plan for revision and editing.
