Frontloading

Course: Technical Reports                                                                                                                      Instructor:

1. OVERVIEW OF ASSIGNMENT

This assignment is designed to give students practice writing Descriptions. As students will be writing and submitting a final report towards the end of the semester, this assignment would be useful as a way of helping students polish their writing skills.

In this assignment, you will formally write descriptions of an IT System. The description should include both the Components Description (Object Description) and Process Description of the same system.

Before starting your homework keep the planning phase in your mind. It should include guideline steps for planning descriptions mentioned in chapter # 11.

Remember, techniques for organizing descriptions easily follow standard deductive order: begin with the main point and then give details. Organizing this way means ‘frontloading’ information which is vital descriptions clarity. In this homework, organize your descriptions keeping in mind this technique.

2. REQUIREMENTS

The requirements for the Describing assignment are:

• It should be not more than 2 double-spaced pages. (At least 1 page long)
• Include the evaluation criteria table on a separate page just after the title page
• Provide a cover-page for your assignment in which you state clearly:

• University and college names
• the assignment title: “Describing”
• the course name
• your name and ID

• It should address ALL of the following information related to Central Processing Units as presented in the following link: http://homepage.cs.uri.edu/faculty/wolfe/book/Readings/Reading04.htm

Introduction

Plan the introduction to your description carefully. Make sure it does all of the following things (but not necessarily in this order) that apply to your particular description:

• Indicate the specific object about to be described.
• Indicate what the audience needs in terms of knowledge and background to understand the description.
• Provide a general description of the object.
• Include an overview of the contents of the description.

If the thing you are describing is not likely to be familiar to most of your readers, consider adding some background before you plunge into the actual description. If you are about to describe a Filament-winding machine to non-technical or semi-technical, you’d better first discuss what in the world the thing is, what it does, who use it, for what, where and when.

Product Description (Components Description)

The main part of your description is the discussion of each part or characteristic. You must divide the thing you are describing into parts, or characteristics, or both. Parts are easy: for example, a wooden pencil has lead, a wooden barrel, an eraser, and a metal clip. Characteristics are describable aspects of a thing but are not parts: for example, the pencil has a certain weight, length, width, and so on.

Once you’ve divided the thing you are describing into parts, characteristics, or both, your next job is to describe each one. For mechanical things, it works well to start by defining the part, by explaining its function. After that, you describe the part from general to specific, following a deductive organization.

Process Description

Summarize the operation or process associated with the object you’re describing. For example, if you’ve just described a filament-winding machine, you could briefly explain how it works to produce the filament windings.

By contrast, the product description which focuses on an object representation in space, the process description examines the object’s actions over time. In general, break the whole process up into smaller stages (steps), and describe each stage in logical order.

3. EVALUATION CRITERIA:

Before submitting your assignment, please go through the evaluation criteria and check all requested information are provided.