Popular Science

Popular science writing requires an understanding of the scientific field and the ability to write clear, readable prose that is accessible to the members of the educated general public. This assignment is designed to provide an introduction to popular science writing.

Every research project begins with a research question and a tentative thesis. For this project, your question will be one about your chosen topic as it relates to the natural sciences. (See some of the examples I gave in the first paragraph of "Content and Resources.") Having come up with a question, you will search the library's databases for related articles. When you have found and skimmed at least three promising articles, you will come up with a tentative thesis that answers that question. The next step will be to research further to make sure you have three scholarly sources that will provide a thorough answer to your research question and prepare a list of Cited References for the three articles. Based on your notes, you will turn in summaries of your three sources, each of which begins with a CSE-formatted reference.  All papers in this course will require an outline, a rough draft, and a final draft. The final paper should be about 800-1,000 words, and sources will be cited with CSE citation-sequence style.

Additional Separate Part of the Paper

A summary of an article provides in condensed form the thesis of the article and themain points of evidence used to demonstrate that thesis. Since you will be presenting this information for a lay audience, the evidence should be summarized in general layman's terms. DO NOT use direct quotes! Each summary should begin with the CSE-style citation of the article and should be approximately 200 words long. The summaries must relate directly to the answer of your research question.