CS 3604: Assignment 3 (Review of Technical Article)

Spring 2005, Dr. Dunlap

Due dates: ? (no first draft on this one)

Approximate size: No fixed size, this will vary according to your review.

Learning objectives:
Like many other disciplines, a good place to learn about writing is to review and criticize someone else's work. This writing assignment will help familiarize you with the reviewing process for writing, helping you find problems of writing and the pitfalls of the kind that you can also expect to find in your own work.

Audience:
The audience for your review is mainly the author of the technical paper and the editor who is in charge of the revision process. The audience for your answers to the reviewing questions below includes the instructor and GTA.

The Task (What to do):
In this assignment you will read, review, and mark up (in red) a technical article. You will then write additional comments as specified for the process of reviewing, and answer some opinion questions about the subject and content of this paper.

1. Print a copy of the article, and read it with a red pencil or pen in hand. As you read it, mark it up for spelling, word use, and grammatical errors. Consult the editing guidelines from Prentice-Hall to find the markup symbols used by professionals. Simple insertions and deletions should suffice for most of it. You are not required to use these symbols, but your markings are expected to be clear and easy to understand so that the audience (the author, the instructor, and the GTA) can easily understand the point you are making or change you are suggesting and the text to which your comments refer. There are about 50 "seeded" errors in this article, and you may even find ones that we did not put there. We don't expect you to find all the cases we think are errors, but you should get most of the ones that are more clear-cut.

2. Read Jolliffe's guidelines for reviewing, and another set of questionshttp://courses.cs.vt.edu/%7Ecs3604/support/Writing/Review.Questions.html developed by the Department of English, Virginia Tech.Then write answers to these three items mentioned in Joliffe's process of reviewing:
  • Has the writer met the expectations of his intended readers in terms of quality and salience of ideas, organization and support, and usage, mechanics, and punctuation?
  • Are the central ideas clear, correct, appropriate, and adequately developed?
  • Is the paper organized in some acceptable fashion so that the parts stick together and one part leads to the next?

Supplement your answers to each of the above questions by giving specific examples of how the paper can be improved.

Deliverables for Assignment 3 (stapled together in this order, please):
The written portions of this assignment (on reviewing, and on the content) must be read carefully and marked up by two proofreaders.

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