BIS 490B (LN 11313)

Senior Seminar:

Toni Morrison's Beloved in Cultural Context 

David S. Goldstein, Ph.D.

Article Abstract Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to practice the important skills of reading and summarizing scholarly articles and to help you and your group members learn about your chosen topic.

Each member of your research cluster will post two article abstracts. To do that, follow these steps:

• First, select the two scholarly articles you have found in peer-reviewed journals that you think would be of most interest to your group members and your ultimate audience, the visitors to our web page. (If you are unsure how to identify a scholarly article, read the Campus Library's guide athttp://library.uwb.edu/guides/sources.html , which you also can get to from the "External Links" area in Blackboard.)  Make sure no one in your group is duplicating any of the articles.  Check Ulrich's Periodicals Directory to make sure your journal is peer-reviewed.  Note that not everything in a peer-reviewed journal is necessarily a research article.  Some journals include book reviews, editorials, and other non-article content which cannot be used for this assignment.  In other words, use your skills to determine whether your chosen article is from a peer-reviewed journal and is an original research article .  Consult a librarian or me if you have any questions about a source you want to use.
• If either of your article includes its own abstract, or you have found an abstract of your article somewhere else, I strongly recommend that you do not read it!  It is difficult not to be influenced by an abstract written by someone else, and it makes it harder to produce your own based only on your own critical reading and thinking.  Moreover, you run the risk of using too much of the original abstract, either intentionally or unintentionally, which can lead to academic integrity problems.  It is important to avoid the appearance of using someone else's intellectual property without attribution.
• Then, read "Writing Abstracts" athttp://leo.stcloudstate.edu/bizwrite/abstracts.html .
• Then, write an informative abstract of 200 to 300 words, following the "Writing Abstracts" guide. Please write your document in Microsoft Word.  Although the "Writing Abstracts" web site example is single-spaced and does not contain full publication information, please make sure that your abstract is double-spaced and contains, anywhere in the document, the article's full publication information: full title, author, journal title, and publication date, and full information about the database from which it was retrieved, if any (e.g., ProQuest. Retrieved 2 Apr. 2009.).  Please use a standard academic header as shown in item #20 in "Tips for Better Prose" athttp://faculty.washington.edu/davidgs/Prose.html (which does not count toward the word count).
• Name your Word files LastnameAbstract1 and LastnameAbstract2 (with your own last name, with identical capitalization and no spaces), like this:

MahoneAbstract1 and MahoneAbstract 2

• Finally, no later than 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 22, post your abstract in Blackboard. To do so, log onto Blackboard and click on "Communication," then on "Group Pages."  Click on your research cluster link, and then on "Discussion Board."  Then click on the "Article Abstracts" link and then on my message. Click on the "Reply" button and attach your abstract, which must be a Word document, to your message.
  

Your abstracts will be graded together  on the following criteria:

Completeness and accuracy	80 percent
Conventions	20 percent
TOTAL	10 percent of course grade

This page last updated March 29, 2009.

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