What a college-level paper should look like!

To prepare you for the high-paying jobs that you all want,
you need to learn how to think, write, and present your thoughts to others.

After you have collected your data for Project#1 and/or Project#2 for Vogeler's Geography 111, Human Geography, you will need to make tables in a spreadsheet program, such as Excel, to calculate values (totals and percentages), create attractive looking tables, make optional (but highly desirable) bar graphs, paste them into Word, etc. You will also need to know how to use a word processing program, such as Word, to insert Excel tables, format text, insert a "Landscape" map in "Portrait" text, page breaks, etc. Everybody (yes, that includes those who think they already know how to do these procedures) must use the resources at BITS and the Writing Center. On your project cover sheet, indicate the date and time of your visit(s) to BITS and the Writing Center; signatures from the staff are not necessary.

Learning computer skills while actually doing a project is the best way of learning. All these skills can be applied in other courses and, hopefully, in your careers. Because BITSand teh Writing Center are free services, I will assume that you have learned the above mentioned skills when I grade the projects.

I have provided a basic outline of the issues that I want you to address
when writing papers for Vogeler's Geography 111, regardless of which project topic you have selected.

In WORD, use a "Header" to include your name, paper title, and page number at the top of each page.

Paper Title: must include the specific topic and geography (where) of your paper

1) Introduction: Mention each part of the project and how they are related to each other
(I usually write this section after I have written the whole paper; then, I know what I actually did!)

2) Predictions: Before you started collecting your data, think about where your various things in your room might come. Be as detailed as you can by type of item and place (country, world region).

3) Patterns from My Data

* Describe how you collected and categorized your data into item and place categories.

* Discuss each category of items by world regions; also where you don’t have things from.

* Use separate paragraph(s) for the discussion of each table (and graph). Include tables (and graphs if you did them) as soon as you can after you talked about them, but don’t split tables on two pages.

Here are some things to do when creating tables for your projects.

* Now relate your findings back to your predictions. What did you discover?

4) World Map of your topic. Think about each element of the map: title, legend, source(s). You have already made several maps for this course, so avoid previous errors.

5) Relate your research findings to the slogan or metaphor: Describe in detail the slogan or metaphor you are using; then cite percentages from your data to these ideas.

6) What geographical themes and concepts, discussed in this course or learned from other sources, are relevant to this project? Some of these are more obvious than others. So think about your answer before writing this section of the paper.

7) Conclusion: Make some general statements about what you learned doing this project in terms of your role as a consumer as it relates to the regions/countries of the world.

Staple the whole thing in the upper left-hand corner!