Prompt: The second draft collects your next iteration of thoughts and ideas as you work through your research paper analysis and its written presentation. This assignment should reflect a nearly complete concept through the solution. You should apply the approaches and skills that have been introduced and demonstrated to you thus far. You may be in the developing stages of your evaluation, and that will be reflected in your draft. Nonetheless, your thought process and your initial efforts, as well as significant progress since your first draft, should be apparent.
Directions: This assignment has three parts: Cover Letter, 2000+ Word Draft, and Reference List (combined in a single file for submission). Your score on this assignment will be based on your Draft and Reference List. The Cover Letter is a reflective assignment intended to help you grow as an author and help our team provide feedback. The Cover Letter is required, and your draft will not be graded without its inclusion. Each of these three parts of this assignment is described in detail below.
Cover Letter: The first page of your submitted file should be a one-page (max length) cover letter, presented as a memo addressed to your instructors. The cover letter should reflect on your experience, process, and progress to date. It should answer the four following questions and raise any other issues you would like to bring up to your instructors. This should be a reflection specifically on this assignment.
A draft without a cover letter will be considered incomplete and WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED for grading.
DO NOT use your cover letter from your first draft (that is plagiarism because we have asked you to write a new letter!). You can copy/paste the questions from the prompt.
1) Overall, how do you feel about this assignment? What part of the assignment do you feel most confident in?
2) Briefly describe key points in the process of doing this assignment (e.g., how and why you chose the topic, what parts of the writing process did you spend the most time on, were there any major changes in your planning process, how did your ideas develop and hopefully improve, and any particular problems you faced or anticipate).
3) Based on your experience with your draft thus far, what do you plan to do to further develop toward the next draft in order to improve your evaluation and/or written presentation?
4) What issues are you particularly interested in having the instructors respond to?
Draft 2000+ Words: You should develop your draft according to the specifications outlined below.
1. Your draft should consist of 2000 or more words in the text of the draft. (Cover Letter and Reference List are not included in the word count.) You should read the Background section below for context on the content and topical focus of your paper. Note: you MUST be able to clearly link the topic you identify to the human food web in your analysis, problem definition, and solution. That said, we do appreciate creativity and recognize there are many different aspects of society and nature that interlink with our human food web. We are happy to offer advice and support as you work through your process.
2. We encourage you to build on your 1000+ word first draft and revise based on your greater understanding, ideas development, and feedback from your instructors and peers.
3. You may use writing from your 1000+ word first draft (and that is not plagiarism because you are revising a document that is a required draft leading up to the final submission of the assignment).
4. You may use ideas and sources from your discussion board posts, but you may NOT copy/paste from those assignments (copy/paste would be plagiarism). If it helps your work toward your final paper, you may expand on those ideas and integrate them into your draft and final paper.
5. Your draft should include a thesis statement within the first or second paragraph.
6. The issue or challenge that you select must connect to the human food web. Paper topics that do not demonstrate a clear connection to the human food web will be considered incomplete and will not be graded.
7. Within your 2000+ Word Draft, you should have a complete paper from beginning to end, with a complete set of thoughts from beginning/introduction to conclusion. Some areas may not be well-polished, but the ideas and flow should be present. Your claims should be well-researched, well-supported, and well-cited.
8. Your draft should consist of complete paragraphs with in-text citations. A draft without in-text citations will be considered incomplete and WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED for a grade. We will give feedback on incomplete work, but no grade will be assigned. In-text citations must match to a reference in your Reference List.
9. You may use quotations in your second draft, and they will be allowed in your final paper. Quotations DO NOT count toward your total word count for the second draft or the final paper.
10. The maximum length for your final research paper is 3,000 words. Feel free to write more than 2000 words for this draft. If we have more to review, we can offer more feedback. We will not grade beyond 3,000 for ANY composition work – either of the drafts or the final paper. Anything beyond that upper limit will not be considered for your grade for that assignment. The reference list does not count toward word count.
11. Your ideas will continue developing at this stage. Embrace the revision process.
Reference List: You must include a complete list of references that you have included in your draft. You should include at least 10 scholarly/academic sources in your draft. You may revise the references used and how they are used as you develop your paper further. You may also use non-academic sources in addition to the 10 scholarly sources minimum.
Your reference list at the end DOES NOT count toward your total (2000+ minimum) word count.
When citing sources in the text as well as in your reference list, you should follow the American Psychological Association (APA) editorial manual (7th ed., 2019)Links to an external site.. Use the link to find answers to your citation questionsLinks to an external site..
Your draft should include complete reference details that match to your in-text citations, including active doi links or URLs where available (if you’re accessing it online, there is a link available!). A draft without citations including active doi links or URLs where available will be considered incomplete and WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED for a grade. If you need assistance with proper citations, please reach out to the helpdesk or visit TA office hours.
Purpose: Here’s where your research paper IMPROVES via a first formal revision (from the first draft).
The purpose of the second draft assignment is to demonstrate the progress toward your analysis. Good stories are engaging throughout, thus we expect you to demonstrate progress for the beginning, middle, and end of the document. By preparing this document and critically reviewing it, you will again verify whether the revisions, new analysis, and ideas you have proposed, and the sequence in which you have organized them, truly support your arguments.
Background: Your major assignment in ETMA 311 is to write a 2,500-3,000 word research paper proposing a workable solution to an urgent problem facing the food web. Drawing on your growing understanding of systems thinking, your paper’s solution should be justifiable and scholarly sound, integrating at least 10 academic sources. You’ll participate in a mandatory peer review and submit a polished final version at the end of the course. You can read a full description of the research paper assignment on the syllabus. You will find a sample grading rubric for the final paper at the bottom of this assignment description. Pay attention to the distribution of points on the final paper. Note that it includes engagement in the revision process. The completion of each building block assignment is part of this process and will be reflected in your final research paper grade.
How Does This Assignment Support Your Learning: The assignments we have developed for you throughout ETMA 311 are designed to foster your exploration of our Humanity in the Food Web. It is through this exploration where you will be given the opportunity to test your ideas, receive feedback, and revise, thus embracing the revision process. It is worthwhile for you to understand that this process should be useful for you outside of this class and in your practice in the future. Thus, each of these assignments has a real world purpose and a strategy regarding when and how to use documents in the future.
Prolific writers, generally speaking, write a little every day. Writing becomes a daily habit for them. We model much of this process via Discussion Boards and Paper Drafts, encouraging steady development and documentation of your ideas. We would suggest that if you could set aside 1/2 hour every day to write a little of your term paper, it would then become a very easy assignment. In lieu of this, we substitute assignments like this, and the 2000+ word draft later this semester, to help you along the way. By this point in the semester, you should have written 1600-3200 words in Discussion Boards and 1000+ words in your first draft, demonstrating that you can write in small sections and progress toward the larger goal. If you start early, and write a little every day, or at the very least every couple of days, a document like this just becomes part of a process. Embracing this learn-develop-revise process will lead you to great success.
The grading rubric for the second draft is attached to this assignment. It is viewable just below this prompt and titled “Paper Draft #2 (last rev F23)”.
Note on grading the 2000+word second draft: you can earn full credit for the draft in the top three categories of the rubric for each criteria. In order to display them correctly, we had to drop the available points incrementally (and we chose the smallest increment allowable). Nonetheless, if you fall in any of the top categories, you will receive up to the top level of points available. Your second draft should be an advancement from your first draft, and you are expected to be beyond the beginner level for this assignment.
Here is an example 2000 word draft. This is the next progression of ideas from the example we included with Draft #1. Download Here is an example 2000 word draft. This is the next progression of ideas from the example we included with Draft #1.
The grading rubric for the final research paper can be found here if you would like to review it. Download The grading rubric for the final research paper can be found here if you would like to review it.
REMINDER: You must turn in at least one draft and the final paper in order to earn a passing grade for ETMA 311.
A NOTE ON LATE SUBMISSIONS: You will be completing a peer review on this draft. You must turn in a draft to participate in the peer review. Late submissions will be accepted according to the course late policy, but peer review partners will be assigned on the due date. We will assign partners to late submissions as they are received, but we cannot guarantee partners for drafts turned in late, as that is dependent on other late submissions.
THIS IS THE RUBRIC.
they are extremely hard on grading, especially with plagarism etc.
attached below is my first draft and this is my feedback from the TA:
You have found an interesting problem in the human food web to address in your research paper and are off to a good start in developing your ideas. Here is some feedback based on the rubric:
Understanding of the specific topic and its connections to other aspects of the food web: My biggest concern about your writing is that you appear to be writing your paper on a very broad scale. This can limit your ability to discuss your topic in depth. You should focus your writing to the problem you are discussing and your proposed solution. Implementing the solution may not look the same for every region, species, production style, location in the supply chain, etc. For this assignment, we are looking for you to describe a specific issue within the human food web and propose an actionable solution to solve it. It is important to remember that there are always multiple perspectives to be considered. Your paper is heavily focused on one perspectives and this can sometimes lead to a bias in the information being presented. This draft contains a surface level analysis of the information. I encourage you to dig deeper as you continue to develop your ideas. A little more discussion on the connection to the human food web would be helpful in building a stronger argument. I would encourage you to go back and review the information within Themes 5 on this topic. Dr. Green-Miller provided a great example of narrowing your topic within her email response to you on 2/27. You are welcome to attend a set of office hours and talk through this with a TA!
Logical flow and clarity of arguments: Your paper outlines your ideas in an organized fashion. I would encourage you to use your outside sources to build stronger more developed arguments. A key component of a research paper is to have a clear one sentence thesis statement in the introduction. I would encourage you to build a stronger thesis statement. A thesis statement should include an overview of the most important details of your entire paper.
Supporting research and Citations: The prompt requested a minimum of 10 scholarly sources. Some of your sources are credible and important for supporting your ideas, but they are not scholarly. There are some mistakes within your reference list citations. You can review the citation materials within the Skills 2 module. Some of the sources you used are biased in nature, and that bias was not acknowledged in the draft.
Effectiveness of presentation: clarity, spelling, grammar, and style: The paper is easy to read but in research papers, we tend to stray away from using first person.
Proposed Solution: You are off to a good start and mention multiple interesting solutions. You need to narrow it down and focus on one of them to develop more in your next draft. As you narrow your topic this should become more clear. You can include some further details about implementation and further outside support.
Addressing the prompt: Good job addressing the prompt. Your topic has potential for a strong research paper as you continue to do research and develop your ideas.
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