Group Paper Proposal Assignment (Course: Principles of environmental engineering) 1.1 2008/02/06 16:21:17.292 US/Central 2008/03/28 14:59:46.234 GMT-5 Cain Project cainproject@mailman.rice.edu Cain Project cainproject@mailman.rice.edu Engineering Communication Paper Proposal Writing As part of your group paper assignment, you must submit a short (no longer than one page) proposal describing the research you plan to conduct for this assignment. Below are some suggestions for putting together a proposal for your team’s issue: First, evaluate the possible topics. Your syllabus contains a list of topic choices. You may also want to conduct a group brainstorming session to see what ideas you can come up with. Below are a few tips for conducting a brainstorming meeting: Set a time limit (say 25 minutes). Designate someone to write down all the ideas. Try to get everyone in the group to contribute topic ideas. Do not evaluate ideas during the brainstorming session. Just write them down without discussing them. After your time limit is up, generate criteria for evaluating your ideas (i.e. “the topic must be of interest to all group members”, or “there must be lots of research available on the topic”). Compare your ideas to the criteria you generated and eliminate the ideas that don’t meet the criteria. Pick your best idea. After you decide on an issue, you should conduct some preliminary research to narrow down your topic, and to identify what research question you will pursue in your paper. Once you’ve identified a specific problem or question, you are ready to write. Your proposal should define both the problem/question and the methods used to research it. Questions the problem/question section should address: What is the technology, phenomenon, or issue you will review in your paper? In other words, what is your general topic area? What is the specific problem/question you will investigate within this more general topic area? Why is this problem/question important? Questions the methods section should address: How do you plan to research your problem/question? What (library) resources will you need? How do you plan to organize the group paper? What is your projected timeline?