Aug 22 Assignment

             The major writing #1 assignment is an interesting project because rather than writing a paper as if we were in our intended field of study we are writing a paper about how papers are written in that field. This paper will be based off of an interview, several academic papers, and several non-academic papers. I haven't taken any English/writing classes in the last six years so I don't have very much to relate this assignment too. That being said, I think if someone had provided a paper like our first major writing assignment to me when I was a first year student it would have been very helpful because it would prepare me for the technical writing aspect of an engineering career. When I was expected to write 10-20 page lab reports formatted and cited in a particular way it was a big shock and very challenging. Hopefully papers like this assignment can be shared with incoming first years because the technical communication of STEM research is done in a very exact way, and it was not what I expected.

Questions:
1. With three academic and non-academic papers needed I would like to know how you define non-academic papers. Are we speaking about potential news articles based off of scholarly papers by researchers, or something even less based in fact?

2. Is it acceptable to use a paper from the same professional that we interview as one of our academic papers?

3. Is it allowed to use more than one paper from the same research group?