1. Using the sample articles provided in lesson 8, do the following:
-Evaluate the best and worst articles and fill out a DOCS sheet for each.
-Write a brief one page memo explaining in detail why you chose the articles as best and worst. Submit the memo as its own file when you submit your final research paper.
This assignment will be assessed according to DOCS. The possible points per category are listed as follows: Design = 4, Organization = 4, Content = 4, Style = 4.
2. Research and write your business article. See the “Choosing a Topic and Analyzing Other Articles” for directions.
This assignment will be assessed according to DOCS. The possible points per category are listed as follows: Design = 10, Organization = 10, Content = 20, Style = 20.
To ensure your article is current, choose from the list of pre-approved topics. These topics are broad, so you will need to narrow your topic to suit the length requirements of the assignment. Please see the assignment descriiption for the specific length requirements.
List of Pre-approved Topics:
-Recent IPOs (e.g., Twitter)
-Obamacare/Healthcare.gov
-Recent mergers and acquisitions (e.g., Google’s purchase of Nest)
-Customer service
-Employee motivation
-Employee engagement
-Employee satisfaction
-New product/service announcements (e.g., iPhone 6 Plus)
-Media piracy
-Information security (e.g., Adobe’s and Target’s recent security breaches)
-Consumer privacy
-Planning for retirement
-Cost of obesity in America
-Great Recession
Use the following guidelines to design your article.
General guidelines:
Information in columns flows in a logical direction. That is, readers know intuitively where a column continues (usually on the next page) by the continued column’s placement.
Images, graphs, and tables don’’t cover up text and aren’t cut off.
Font styles are simple, few, and appropriate. For example, the title and headings are the same sans serif (Calibri and Arial are good basic choices), while the body text is an easy-to-read serif, such as Cambria or Times New Roman.
Paragraphs aren’t too long, and bulleted lists are used where appropriate.
Paragraphs should be left justified, not block justified. Block justified can cause lines to space out the words awkwardly.
Images shouldn’t make columns exceptionally narrow. To see an article with this problem, refer to the image to the right of the first paragraph in the section Accessibility in the “Cloud Computing” article located in the Sample Business Article PDF.
Color is used judiciously. Use color as a highlight or an accessory, and make sure the color is easy to see (i.e., it has high contrast with the page). As a general rule, use black for the body text and a high-contrast color for headings and titles. If you put text in a colored box, make sure the text is white for darker colors and black for lighter colors.
Visuals: Visuals include photos, vector art, tables, and graphs (each explained in chapter 4 on pages 45–50). Follow five critical rules about visuals:
Relevance. Use only relevant, useful visuals. Don’t drop in some random clip art or photo just to have something on the page.
Placement. Place the visual in an appropriate place relative to the information it relates to. See chapter 4 for placement guidelines, specifically seen under the three i’s.
Explanation. Explain the visual. Use a caption and title to identify the visual and its purpose. Review chapter 4 for details on using visuals.
Originality. Create your own tables and charts. Do not copy and paste tables and charts from the Internet for two reasons: (1) you need to develop the skill of creating them yourself, and (2) most images from the Internet are low resolution and will look very fuzzy when printed. If you find a table or chart that your article truly needs, you must re-create it yourself.
High quality. Make sure photos are high quality so they are crisp when printed. See chapter 4 for information about ensuring the use of the right photos.
Important Tip: What looks good on a screen may not look as good printed. Screen resolution makes many visual elements look much better than they do in print.
Click on the link below to view examples of the type of feedback offered for the article assignment. To view comments, you can either hover the mouse over the small sticky note balloon or double-click on the balloon.
Sample Graded Articles
DOCS: Organization
OABC still applies to the business article. However, the opening and agenda tend to be more creative. Where the typical agenda might list three factors that the document reviews, the article’s agenda might raise intriguing questions that then get answered throughout the article.
The table below outlines how you might apply OABC to the business article.
OABC Business Article
Opening Attention-grabbing introductions include the following:
an anecdote
a descriiption (e.g., if you’re writing about management styles, describe the behavior readers might see if they could watch a day in the life of a manager.)
a relevant quotation
a compelling or engaging question (Make sure you neither ask an obvious question nor pose a series of questions; it can get annoying.)
Agenda the thesis statement or key point
Body the research and ideas that support the thesis statement
Close The close should generally refer to your thesis and sum up the key points. You can also tie back to your introductory element by doing the following:
finishing the anecdote
revising the descriiption in terms of the key points
giving a quote by the same source as the opening quotation and relating it to the concluding idea
answering the opening question
Note: Think of the introduction and the conclusion as the bookends of the article.
Headings
Headings provide a snapshot of the article’s structure and content; therefore, each heading should do the following:
Correspond to the agenda. In the customer service article, the agenda is “Business owners and executives alike can learn a valuable lesson from the customer service (or love) shown by Dutch Bros. and Southwest Airlines.” The sections and their headings should then focus on these areas: the Dutch Bros.’ customer service and Southwest Airline’s service as compared with Dutch Bros’.
Be descriiptive and compelling. In the “How Secure Is Secure?” example, the first section is titled “Information Security”—a pretty bland and broad title. What does the section specifically say about information security? Make the heading a kind of summary or catch-phrase for the section’s main idea.
Example: The Importance of Information Security
Another example: Information Security: What is it?
A better example: Information Security: If the Windows Aren’t Secure, Securing the Doors Doesn’t Matter
The last example is made more descriiptive by using an analogy.
Be parallel. Each heading should follow the same grammatical structure.
Do not use these: section one = Why Information Security Is Important; section two = Adobe’s Security Breach; section three = What Caused Target’s Security Breach? These three headings are not parallel. The first has the structure why + subject + verb; the second heading has the structure adjective + noun; and the third heading has the structure of a complete question.
Instead, use the same structure for all of your headings. For example, if you make the example headings all into complete questions, you might end up with the following headings: Why Is Information Security Important? What Caused Adobe’s Security Breach? What Caused Target’s Security Breach?
Note: The summary section’s heading should be equally descriiptive and compelling. It is not acceptable to have the heading “Summary.” A more acceptable heading would be “Where Do Companies Go from Here with Security?”
Use the same font size for the same level. Generally, this idea means the title uses the largest font and each section’s heading uses fonts smaller than the title’s. Subsection headings should use a font size even smaller than the section headings and should visually look like they are a subsection and not another main section.
Note that in the article “Obesity in the Workplace” the first two sections—“Increased Medical Costs” and “Increased Workplace Costs”—are the same size as each other. However, the next section, “Reduce Costs and Conclusion,” are bigger, even though they should be the same size as the first two section headings.
Another note about the obesity article is that it appears to have two titles: one is seen at the top of the page and the other is seen at the beginning of the actual text. Only one is needed—the longer, more descriiptive one—but its placement should be just above the beginning of the text, where readers’ eyes naturally go to start reading.
Be capitalized according to the rules in the textbook’s appendix.
Not this: Increased medical costs
This: Increased Medical Costs
Not this: The Risks Of Outsourcing
This: The Risks of Outsourcing
Important Tip: Use the guidelines in chapter 2 (pp. 18–24) to create a thorough outline to ensure that the organization is logical and complete and that headings are descriiptive and parallel.
DOCS: Content
Chapter 5 provides the best summary of what makes content high quality—specifically, it incorporates the four c’s: clear, complete, correct, and compelling (pp. 59–60). Review those sections and corresponding information in chapter 5 to ensure your article’s content is high quality.
An added element of content is the use of secondary resources. Your article—and any research paper, whether academic or business—should rely more on paraphrasing and summarizing of others’ ideas and much, much less on quoting others. An article that consists of strings of long quotations does not sufficiently focus on your thinking.
To ensure you use secondary sources effectively, please review the following presentation and the checklist below.
Writing the Briefing Article Presentation
Checklist for Using Resources
For both paraphrasing and direct quoting, give proper credit by doing two things: (1) introduce the source (i.e., tell who or what you have gotten your information from) and (2) cite the source according to the citation method you are using (APA, Chicago, MLA, etc.).
Introduce quotations; don’t plop them in the paragraph.
Use transition words such as “for example,” “in addition,” or “as demonstrated by” to connect the secondary resources’ ideas to your main idea.
Keep direct quotations to a very small percentage, and only directly quote something that cannot be said any better.
Paraphrase statistics and other fact-based information.
When referring to an individual, the first time you mention him or her, use the person’s entire name, along with his or her title and/or who he or she is within the industry. For example, you could write, “In the Harvard Business Review article ‘What Are You Selling?’ professor David Ray wrote that trust plays a greater role in successful selling than any other aspect (p. 37).”
All subsequent times you refer to the same individual, use his or her last name only, not the first name. For example, you could write, “Ray also concluded that . . . .”
DOCS: Style
As with content, chapters 3 and 5 provide the most thorough details around style to ensure that you write your article effectively. In particular, use the textbook’s guidelines for the following:
CLOUD and paragraphs in both chapter 3 (pp. 38–40) and chapter 5 (pp. 60–61)
sentences and their guidelines as explained in the appendix (pp. 197–229)
grammar and mechanics—apply all the rules appropriately as explained in the appendix. Check particularly for questions about the following:
commas
colons
quotation marks
capitalization
numbers
agreement and reference
Final Advice: Read other well-written articles to see how their authors open, present, and summarize ideas.
BUSINESS ARTICLE
Purpose: Write a short and informative article on a current business topic. This assignment will help you
learn to locate and comprehend background knowledge, synthesize it with your own ideas,
and express your understanding clearly and compellingly. You will gain familiarity with
database and internet research techniques, and the design requirements will teach you to
format an attractive “magazine article” document.
• Locate information using current technologies (secondary research)
• Do background reading to understand the current “conversation” on your topic
• Take notes and organize data and references
• Draft a short article for an educated but uninformed reader
• Follow conventions of quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing
• Avoid plagiarism by documenting borrowed information
• Design an attractive layout
REQUIREMENTS
Length: 1,200-1,500 words; two to three pages, including a reference list
Format: Arrange text in two columns with a banner heading
Use a readable business font for the text
Use a bold font for the title and headings
Single space body text, double space between paragraphs
Create and include one graphic, table, or chart that supports your content
Use a smaller font for your references section
References: Use five or more relevant published works and Internet sources
Most references (at least half) should be within the last year
Use in-text and a bibliographic reference list, following APA style (except that hanging
indentation is not required.)
No Wikipedia references allowed.
To be clear, there is 2 separate assignments. The first assignment is to evaluate the best and worst articles and fill out a DOCS sheet for each and then write a brief one page memo explaining in detail why you chose the articles as best and worst. AND the 2nd assignment is a 2 page research paper/article. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to reach out.