Project planning in teams

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Dear Student,
What you really need to do is sitting down at a place where you can freely and deeply think about specific answers to these specific steps already provided for you. But not to narrate any further, here are the specific suggestions I have for you. (Since I already emailed you to provide me with those from your own but didn't hear from you, I will provide suggesions to how I normally tackle postings).

1. Describe the assignment's general topic as well as the paper's purpose and audience.
Here are some steps I learned when I was an undergrad:

Academic assignments create a situation in which a dual rhetoric is involved. There is an element of pretense, because the writing is not for a real world situation. There is usually a hypothetical, pretended, audience for the writing, in addition to the "real" audience, the instructor. The needs of these two audiences are quite different, and the conflict between the two can be confusing. For example, you may be writing an informative report, but you may feel that the instructor already knows all the information you have to present. How do you choose what to include and what to leave out if the reader already knows everything?

Parallel to the problem of dual audiences is the problem of purpose. The immediate purpose is to influence the instructor to give a good grade, but the document usually has another hypothetical function related to the assignment.

Identifying the Audience
The following questions will help you identify the intended audience:

*The teacher is one reader, but most assignments have other hypothetical readers that students are supposed to address. *Who are they?
*What do these readers know about the topic? What do they need to know?
*What are these readers likely to believe about this topic? Are they likely to agree or disagree with you?
*If this assignment were a real-world piece of writing, how would readers use it? What would they use it for? Would the writing, as it exists, serve their needs?

These are the questions you should consider yourself when sitting down to work on this part of the pre-writing process. As for defining purpose for this topic of yours, there are the following questions you should consider:

Discovering the Purpose
The following questions will help you discover your purpose:

***What is the instructor's purpose in making the assignment? What does the instructor want you to learn? What kind of knowledge does the instructor want you to demonstrate?
***What is your purpose as a writer (besides getting a good grade)? Is it to sell something, explain something, describe how to do something, persuade the reader of something, record or document something?
***Is the writing effective in accomplishing your purpose? Is the style appropriate? Is the organization what the audience expects? Are your arguments convincing and well-supported?
***What role are you supposed to play as a writer in this situation? Are you supposed to write as a layman, a professional-in-training, a full-fledged member of the profession, or in some other role?

As far as free-writing or brainstorming goes, another article from one of the valuable sites I often used have helped me tremendously~

Introduction to Prewriting (Invention)
When you sit down to write...

Does your mind turn blank?
Are you sure you have nothing to say?
If so, you're not alone. Many writers experience this at some time or another, but some people have strategies or techniques to get them started. When you are planning to write something, try some of the following suggestions.

You can try the textbook formula:

State your thesis.
Write an outline.
Write the first draft.
Revise and polish.
. . . but that often doesn't work.

Instead, you can try one or more of these strategies:

Ask yourself what your purpose is for writing about the subject.
There are many "correct" things to write about for any subject, but you need to narrow down your choices. For example, your topic might be "dorm food." At this point, you and your potential reader are asking the same question, "So what?" Why should you write about this, and why should anyone read it?

Do you want the reader to pity you because of the intolerable food you have to eat there?

Do you want to analyze large-scale institutional cooking?

Do you want to compare Purdue's dorm food to that served at Indiana University?

Ask yourself how you are going ...