Subject: Choosing a career or a major can be obvious to some students, but to others, it may be one of the most difficult decisions to make. The topic for your paper is to investigate the similarities and differences of being a student and having a career in the field of your choice. You must have a balance of similarities and differences (meaning roughly half of your paper should be on similarities and half on differences – do not use the same points as a similarity and a difference).
Sources of information: Not required. However, some of you may not know much about the careers in your field. Therefore, I provided a link to Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook. If you use information from that website, you must put “quotation marks” around borrowed materials and note that the information is from the Department of Labor. If you choose to use other outside sources, you MUST cite the sources using in-text citation AND a works cited page (again, with borrowed language being contained within “quotation marks”). Not doing so will be considered plagiarism and an automatic F on the paper.
Purpose: The purpose of this essay is to inform an audience that has little to no knowledge of your career field. A compare and contrast paper looks at the similarities and differences of two subjects.
Audience: Your audience is an academic audience. While that includes your peers (classmates) and your instructor, there are other expectations an academic audience has of a college level paper (proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, formal tone, level of complexity).
Length and document style: The minimum length requirement for this paper is 3 full pages. Maximum length of this paper is 5 full pages (do not exceed). Going over or under length requirement will result in a grade penalty of ten points. You will use MLA format for this paper. A works cited page does not count towards your minimum length requirement.
Deadlines: Your completed, typed draft of your paper for peer response is due Thursday, 2/23/17. Your final draft (with prewriting) is due Tuesday, 2/28/17.
Special assignment stipulations: Students will not be allowed to use second person (you / your) in any of the major papers in this course. Students can use first person (I, my, me, we, us, our) or third person (he, she, it, they, them, him, her).
