First draft of essay & references

What you need to do

Now it is time to start writing! Your first draft is your first attempt at fleshing out your outline. What we expect to see is a development of the basic structure for your essay that you laid out in your outline, with clear use of your references, in a 3-6 page draft. Recall that your final paper is to be between 4 and 6 pages (approximately between 1600 and 2400 words, assuming 400 words per page).

Rules for choosing references are the same as for the outline. Of course we expect most of you will continue to use the references you chose for the outline, but sometimes as you begin work you find that things change. You can certainly add and/or remove references, but you must have at least four references for your first draft.

Be sure to address any comments you received on your outline in your first draft.

We will use the ACM format for references and citations. A brief description is to be found in the following passage, quoted from ACM Word Template for SIGPLAN Conferences.

Use the standard Communications of the ACM format for references — that is, a numbered list at the end of the article, ordered alphabetically by first author, and referenced by numbers in brackets [1].

References must gathered together at the end of your essay, and must be formatted as indicated. Here's an excerpt from the ACM template again:

References

[1]	Bowman, B., Debray, S. K., and Peterson, L. L. Reasoning about
        naming systems.  ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 15, 5
        (Nov. 1993), 795-825.

[2]	Fröhlich, B. and Plate, J. The cubic mouse: a new device for
        three-dimensional iput. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI
	conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '00)
        (The Hague, The Netherlands, April 1-6, 2000). ACM Press, New
        York, NY, 2000, 526-531. 
  
[3]	Lamport, L. LaTeX User's Guide and Document Reference
        Manual. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1986.
 

[4]    Alphonce, Carl.  First draft of essay & references.  Retrieved
       on October 28, 2007.
       http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/faculty/alphonce/Courses/Fall2007/cse115/Essay/FirstDraft/ 

The UB library site has some good resources for writing a research paper. You should look in particular at, Evaluating resources, which describes the differences between a primary and a secondary sources. Other pages you should look at include the page about plagiarism.

When you need to do it by

The essay draft & reference list is due by Friday, November 9, in lecture.

How you hand it in

You must prepare your work using a word processor (e.g. Word) or a document preparation system (e.g. LaTeX). Hand-written work will not be accepted.

Note that the presentation and formatting of what you submit at each stage will factor into your grade. Please note the following submission requirements. Your name and recitation section must appear in the upper right corner of the first page of your essay (do NOT include a separate title page). Your submission MUST be stapled with one staple in the upper left-hand corner, and the papers MUST be arranged in the following order:

1. your first draft of your essay
2. your outline with references with any comments that were written on it.
3. your original essay topic, with any comments that were written on it.

Grading