10. Survey article

 

10.1 Goals--short surveys, library practice

This assignment has several goals:

• To require students to learn to use the reference resources available to them. These resources will be discussed in detail in a guest lecture by a reference librarian.
• To teach you how to write a short survey article (five pages is sufficient).
• To get you started on your final project. This survey article may form a ``background'' section of your final report, or it may be a broad look at a topic that you will focus on more closely in your final project.

A short survey article is a relatively simple form of writing, although finding and selecting the right technical content can be a demanding task. The emphasis in this assignment is on collection, integration, and accurate presentation of technical information.

Good technical writing stands firmly on these two legs: effective rhetorical strategies for meeting the needs of your audience, and absolutely accurate presentation and explanation of technical information.

10.2 Choosing your topic

In choosing your topic for this paper, pick some technical issue or problem with which you are already to some degree familiar, and would like to learn more about. Picking some topic about which you are largely ignorant will make it impossible for you to do a good job with this assignment. If you are thinking of documenting a design project you have already completed for your final project, use this assignment to learn some more about some aspect of your project.

Hint: this survey article may well serve as the first draft of a previous-work section in your final report. Read Section 12 for information about selecting a final project.

We will also discuss appropriate topics in class.

10.3 Textbook resources

The resources in the main text for writing this kind of paper are found in several areas, since, in general, this type of writing is most commonly a component of other kinds of writing. A coherent and inclusive survey of the available information is part of certain kinds of feasibility reports, for example, and a summary of previous research is part of every journal article presenting new research.

Chapter 18 of Huckin and Olsen (Theses and Journal Articles) is relevant to this assignment in part, as are parts of Chapter 14 (Feasibility Reports). Read both of these chapters in preparation for this assignment. Chapters 2 and 21 are also helpful for the general principles of information selection and presentation, Chapter 5 presents an approach for introducing a topic, and Chapter 12 talks about the basic structure of a report.

10.4 Audience Assessment--fellow students

As indicated above, audience assessment is not the main stress in this assignment. Your audience is other people like you--people who knew as much (or as little) as you, before you did this assignment. The more similar the audience is to you, the easier it is to write for--just think about what you would want to know.

The main principle to keep in mind here is always to assume that your audience can be counted on to know rather less than you think they ought to or wish they did.

Warning: in many cultures it is polite to pretend that your reader is highly intelligent, and you flatter them by giving them material that is difficult to understand. This is not true of American technical writing. Here, you flatter people by taking the time to explain something in such a way that they can understand it. Watch out for unconscious cultural effects on your writing.

10.5 Writing process--finding, organizing, writing

The process of writing this assignment can be broken down into three steps: the library search, organizing the information, and writing the paper.

10.5.1 Library search

The library search itself has three steps:

1.

The topic statement. Write a short, quick topic statement that explains what you want to research, and what you would like to know about it. Be as specific as you can, but don't labor over punctuation, sentence structure, and paragraph structure. It is meant to get you started, and will be completely re-done later, or perhaps even thrown out. Mostly you are trying to generate the key words you will need for on-line data base searches and for index use. A couple of paragraphs should be sufficient. Be careful about the breadth of your topic. If you choose too narrow a topic, you'll have difficulty finding information. If you choose too broad a topic, you'll never be able to organize the overwhelming material well enough to say anything. You should probably start with a slightly broader topic, and focus on some narrower part once you have found some material.

2.

The library. Take your topic statement and head for the library, and use your key words (or key terms) in the manner described by the reference librarian in the guest lecture. Be sure to take good notes on this lecture--it is a key part of this assignment.

Don't be afraid of reference librarians if you get completely lost in the library. They have the jobs they have because they like working with students, and really do want to help you learn how to use the resources the library offers. They have more time available in the morning, however, than they do late in the afternoon, when most students seem to descend on them in desperation, so it's wiser to get started early in the day.

If you want to use an on-line index, but don't want to pay the search charges, try the Current Contents, INSPEC, or Computer Articles databases on MELVYL. The MELVYL catalog can be reached from almost any machine on the Internet (its address is melvyl.ucop.edu), but you need a password to get access to the specialized databases. The password is available from the reference desks at either the Science Library or McHenry Library.

Try to find three to five articles relevant to your topic--don't pick the first three you find, however. Find the most relevant and useful ones. Be sure you can read and understand the articles you choose!

3.

Photocopying. Photocopy the articles you intend to use, or the parts you intend to use, if the article is excessively long. Be sure, however, to photocopy completely (including the notes and references cited) the article that you found most helpful and relevant to your interest. This article will be used later as a model for appropriate citation of sources.

Whenever you photocopy an article, make sure you have written on the copy a complete citation for the article, so that you can attribute quotes or paraphrases. It is very frustrating to have a perfect quote, and not be able to use it because you have forgotten where you found it. Many journals and conference proceedings make this easier, by providing adequate citation information in the headers and footers of each page.

10.5.2 Organizing the information

1.

Deciding what to look for. First, make some preliminary decisions about different aspects of your topic. You will need to decide what is most important to put in a survey that is only five pages long. Make a short list of these subtopics: five to seven is likely to be plenty. You will need to have read through all your articles in order to make these decisions. You may change some of these subtopics later, as you go on. Some of them, at least, will be the same or similar to the key words and terms you used in your library search.

2.

Locating the needed information. How you do the next step is pretty much up to you. You need to go through each article and find the information relevant to your subtopics. Here follow some practical suggestions for doing this. Taking notes from each article is the most traditional way, and was the way everyone did library research before the invention and general proliferation of photocopy machines. Copious note taking is still a very good way to proceed if the material is very new to you, since it helps you learn it.

Since you have photocopies, however, you may, rather than taking extensive notes, simply mark up the article to locate all the information you intend to use from it. There are less and more complex ways of doing this, ranging from penciled marginal marks to different-colored highlighting for each subtopic. Work something out for yourself.

3.

Ordering your information. When you have located all the information relevant to your subtopics, you are ready for the next steps.

First, note any major contradictory factual or theoretical claims. You will need to address any area like this very carefully in your paper, comparing the different claims carefully and faithfully. You don't have to try to decide who is right; you're not an expert. What you need to do is get across to your reader what the different prevailing opinions are.

Second, find the clearest explanations for each subtopic, by comparing similar parts for each subtopic from each article. You will be basing your survey on these explanations.

Third, experiment (on paper) with different serial orderings of the information you have found, using simple outlines. When you have found one that seems sensible to you, you are ready to begin to write. This outline will often be visible in the final paper as section headings.

10.5.3 Writing the paper

1.

The initial draft. Begin writing the main body of your paper. Don't worry about writing the introduction yet. Just start with the first point of your rough sequential outline. You are writing a summary of other people's work, fundamentally, so you will be paraphrasing and citing heavily. Don't lose track of where you have borrowed what from. Get the important authors' names into your text: ``Jane Doe shows that ... .'' Work your way through this initial draft. The main writing job is drawing the connections between the different subtopics, and summarizing and citing accurately!

2.

The section headings. Read through your draft and split it up into sections by topic. Try to come up with a good, short header for each section. Add these section headers to the draft--they are extremely valuable to the reader.

3.

Writing the introduction. Now go back and look at your initial topic statement. This is probably now somewhat outdated, but it may provide a basis for your introduction, which you have not yet written. Introductions are fundamentally problem statements. Consult Huckin and Olsen on this issue, in the chapters mentioned above, especially [HO91, Chapter 5]. Write a good, clear, brief introduction to your survey article. Since you have already written the body of the article, and you know what you are going to say in it, the introduction should be fairly easy to do.

Disclaimer: one of the authors (Kevin) always leaves the introduction as the last thing to write and still has trouble figuring out what to say. It helps a lot if the document has some clear purpose--for example, showing that RISC machines will outperform CISC machines for the next five years, rather than simply comparing the performance of the two design styles. It is very difficult to write an introduction for a paper that rambles from topic to topic.

4.

Revising the initial draft. Now rewrite your initial draft, reorganizing and rewriting to make the writing smoother and the explanations and transitions as clear as possible. Where you have particularly abrupt changes of topic, you should try rearranging the text or adding a missing section header before you try smoothing over the gap with a transition sentence.

Your section headers should stand out a bit from the rest of the text. Use bold face if you have it, or underline. If the section headers aren't numbered, you may want to center them. Also, don't put a section header at the bottom of the page--if you don't have room for a paragraph after the section header, start a new page.

Cut or add as necessary to hit five pages, plus or minus a half page. (double line-spaced pages, standard 10-pitch pica type--12-point on a word processor). You can fudge the length with funny size margins, but we prefer a standard 1-1/2'' on the left and 1'' on the right (for a text width of six inches). If you are more comfortable with character or word counts than with page limits, this translates to about 9000 characters or 1500 words.

5.

Citing your sources. Now examine how your most useful article cited its sources. Figure out the system, and do your citations of your sources that way. The reason we have you do this, rather than give you a list of rules and forms, is that every journal does this differently, although there are broad resemblances in citation style within disciplines and between related disciplines. Another reason is that if you have to figure it out for yourself, you will learn how to do it. Bring this draft to class for peer editing.

Unfortunately, many of the articles you will be reading are from trade magazines rather than refereed journals, and may not have adequate citations. In that case, look at one of the IEEE Transactions, the Journal of the ACM, or some other major research journal in the field. Citations should be complete enough that an inter-library loan librarian can find and photocopy the article.

Don't abbreviate journal names, use as much of the authors' names as you can find, and give all the relevant numbers (volume, issue, date, page numbers, ... ). For books, give the publisher and date of publication, and for conferences give the dates and location of the conference. Nowadays, citations are usually sorted in alphabetical order by the author's last name, as this order makes finding particular citations easier after you've forgotten where in the text it was cited. You can look in the References section of this workbook (page ) for examples of one citation style.

10.6 What to bring for peer editing

1.

Your draft.

2.

Your most useful article, which is your model for citation of sources.

3.

A short written list of any questions that have arisen for you while working on this paper.

10.7 Final draft

The final draft should incorporate everything that came out of peer editing, from editorial improvements to more careful citation. You will probably end up reworking your introductory section some, too. If you do any substantial rearranging of your draft on the word processor, be sure to redo the transitions so the seams don't show.

Make sure that your final draft is free of spelling and punctuation errors. Nothing destroys people's confidence in writing more than trivial errors. Your word processor should have some kind of spelling program, and may have a style program that will find sentence fragments and commonly mis-used words. Check to be sure that every item on the list of references at the end is cited somewhere in the text--it is childish to pad your list of references with papers that you didn't directly use. If you have a paper that you feel must be included, but you haven't quoted anything from it, you can add a sentence in your final section, ``Further information can be found in ... .''