Technical Summary of Sources

Having chosen the option that you would like to develop in your technical report, you will proceed with the preliminary research necessary to prepare you to write the report. The sources included in your Technical Summary may or may not be the sources that appear in the final report; in other words, your list of sources in the report may or may not match these materials. This is an opportunity for you to determine what you know, what you need to know, and where you can go with the subject matter.

To that end you will find at least five (5) and no more than (7) sources to include in this Technical Summary. You will be responsible for providing the appropriately formatted entry for that source as well as an explanation of the salient features of the source.

The report itself will follow a memo format; you will not use a letterhead for the memo, but you will include the name of the company. Additionally the memo heading will include the following information:

To:

From:

Date:

Subject:

I have included an example of the formatting with the same explanations for each section that I am providing below in D2L.

The components of this report will include the following – you will include a separate analysis of each source with all of these components for each, being sure to number the sources:

Article/Source Purpose

This first section will explain what the source is attempting to accomplish. In this section you can provide a discussion of your rhetorical assessment of the source – what is the purpose, who is the target audience, and what is the writer’s role (who is the writer and what is his/her/their relationship to the audience and to the work). In other words, what is the source attempting to do, for whom is it attempting to do it, and who is attempting to do it?

Rationale for Topic

The next section will require that you explore the following questions: what is the significance of the topic under discussion; why is it worthy of development? This is an opportunity to assert both the importance of exploring the option that you have selected and the topic specifically being discussed in the source.

Major Points Discussed

In this section, you will identify and explain the major ideas developed in the source. In this instance, this is not simply a list of the ideas. This sections requires that you not only present the significant points under discussion but that you explain those in such as way so that your reader will understand the idea and how it is being explored. You will, then, provide a summary of the discussion of that point, “hitting the highlights” to inform your readers of the contents.

Conclusion

In this final section, you will draw conclusions about the information that was provided in the Major Points Discussed section. You will bring everything together and explain why and how the information presented in that previous section is important. In other words, what observations can we make based on that information? What conclusions can we develop based on what the source has discussed?