Tech essay - Thesis and outline

  • Due Feb 26, 2021 by 11:59pm
  • Points 3
  • Submitting a file upload
  • File Types pdf, doc, and docx

 

Overview of Technology Essay

Imagine you have secured your first full-time professional job after college, in your chosen career community.  At 5pm on Friday afternoon, your supervisor forwards you a recent news article about how some new technology is affecting your field, with the note "Need your reactions for Monday's staff meeting!"  

Over the course of these assignments, you will write a four-page, double-spaced essay, making an argument about how a particular new technology currently being discussed in the news might affect some aspect of your prospective career community.  

Your argument should not only be descriptive (what you think will happen and why), but also normative (whether the consequences will be good or bad).  And you must use scholarly concepts and evidence, from both your course reader and outside sources,  in making your arguments.  

 

Part 3. Thesis and outline.  Given the technology issue you picked as the seed of your paper in the last assignment, and the scholarly resources you have found, craft a thesis (overall argument) and outline (logical progression of evidence supporting your argument).  

 

Steps to follow

1. Write down your topic. Based on the news article that described your chosen technology, and the scholarly articles you found from subsequent searches, try to write down a succinct statement about what your paper is about -- for example, "Topic: The transformation in the daily work of doctors due to the presence of electronic medical records".  Your topic should clearly involve both a particular profession that you are interested in and a particular technology that is affecting that area of work.

2. Develop a thesis.  The argument that you are making about how technology might affect your career community is called your thesis.  It is relatively easy to create a descriptive thesis -- for example, "New advances in machine learning can help automatically identify which credit-card consumers might be likely to default on their payments."  But what we want you to do with this paper is to go farther and create a thesis that is also normative -- in other words, it talks not just about what could happen, but about whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing.  A normative version of the thesis above might be, "New advances in machine learning intended to automatically identify which credit-card consumers might be likely to default on their payments might help improve corporate profits in the short term, but in the long term they will only make it harder for the most disadvantaged consumers to build a history of good credit."

Your thesis does not have to be entirely novel; it can draw from or closely parallel an argument that you found in your news article or in your scholarly literature search.  You can make your thesis your own by narrowing its focus or adapting it to your own chosen career community.

3. Sketch out an outline.  Now plan how your support of that thesis will unfold in your paper.  You may format your outline any way you like.  However, your outline must include the following elements:

  • a description of the topic of your paper (the technology and career community combination that you chose earlier)
  • the intended thesis of your paper (the descriptive and normative argument your paper will make about how the technology affects your chosen career community). 
  • a detailed paragraph-by-paragraph map of the flow of your paper (indicating which scholarly articles you intend to use to help you make your argument, and how the concepts you explored earlier can help you make your argument)
  • a tentative conclusion (that should answer the "why does this matter?" question)

Effective papers often add one more element in their outline:

  • an acknowledgement of any obvious counter-claim that someone might invoke against your thesis, and how you might address that counter-claim

Articulating and addressing a counter-claim to your thesis almost always makes for a better all-around paper; thinking up and addressing a counter-claim inevitably helps students then go back and review and address any weaknesses in their own claims as well.  

Your written paper will only be four double-spaced pages , so you need to be concise!  Your outline should probably not be more than two pages, double-spaced.

4. Consider doing some more searching for sources.  Once you have drafted your outline you may see some opportunities for searching for new news articles or scholarly articles to bolster your arguments.  This iterative process -- find some sources, write down some ideas, find some more sources, do some more writing -- is key to any writing task dealing with evidence and argument.  Use the previous two assignments as a guide to doing some more searching, and see if you can come up with a total list of five or six useful sources.  

5. List your tentative sources.  Now is the time to start formatting all of your initial sources according to a proper citation style. Here is a quick reminder of how to format a list of sources using APA style:

Single-authored book:

  • Carley, M. J. (1999). 1939: The alliance that never was and
    the coming of World War II. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee.

Chapter in an edited book:

  • Melville, H. (1989). Hawthorne and his mosses. In N. Baym (Ed.), The Norton anthology of American literature (3rd ed., pp. 12-34). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Newspaper or magazine article:

  • Pressman, A. (2008, September 29). Bottom fishing in rough waters. BusinessWeek, 27.

Scholarly journal article:

  • Wallace, R. (1997). Monitor: Molecules and profiles. Drug Discovery Today, 2(10), 445-448. doi: 10.1016/S1359-6446(97)01095-7

Website:

Make sure your references are formatted correctly!  Do not simply include a web link to the UW Libraries database page where you found the source!

5. Turn it in. Upload your two-page outline to Canvas, along with your one-page list of the tentative news and scholarly references you intend to use, in order to receive credit for this assignment.

 

Grading rubric

  • 1 point - Concise and interesting topic and thesis, not just descriptive but also normative
  • 1 point - Clear outline that systematically supports thesis, using scholarly references and concepts
  • 1 point - List of tentative sources, formatted consistently and correctly in APA style

  

Tools to become a better writer

 

1614405599 02/26/2021 11:59pm