Academic Writing

10 pages course project and 6 pages research proposal excluding references and figures!!! topic related to environmental problems/issues. At least ten scientific articles on the topic you have selected must be collected. The articles must be peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals within the past five years. You should read the articles carefully and write a report summarizing, comparing and contrasting the articles. Format and contents of the course projects Each course project should have a title page that includes the title of the project, your name, course name and date of the project completion. The text of course projects must have 2.5 cm margins at the top, bottom and on each side. The size of letters must be 12 point (preferred font: Times). The line spacing should be 1.5. Pages should be numbered and the page limit is six. The page limit excludes figures, tables and references cited. Figures and tables, if any, should be numbered and separated from the text. All figures and tables must be referred to the text of your course project. Each figure must have a figure caption that gives reasonable detailed information about the figure. Each figure or table should include the source of the figure or the table if it is not plotted/created by you. Each table should include a title. When citing the references, you must provide the following information in that order: name(s) of authors, year of the paper published, title of the paper, name of the journal, volume and issue of the paper and pages. Examples on citing an article from a scientific journal and a book are as follows: Kawamura, K. and Kaplan, I.R. (1986) Biogenic and Anthropogenic Organic Compounds in Rain and Snow Samples Collected in Southern California. Atmos. Environ. Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 115-124. Hill, J. W., and Kolb. D. K. Chemistry for Changing Times, 7th ed., Prentice Hall, 1995. Each article or book listed in the reference section must be referred to the text of your course project. Figures taken from the web can be referenced by citing the html address as: Robinson, BA. End of the World Predictions [Internet]. Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance; 2007 APR 22, 10:55 UTC [cited 2007 JUN 11]. Available from: [login to view URL] All text must be paraphrased directly from the literature ONLY. Web based excerpts are not allowed and will be considered plagiarism. Be very careful not use (or at least how you use) information from the web. The Format of Course Projects [1] A title page includes title of the project, your name, course number and year. [2] Introduction & Background Information You should provide the background information about your topic. This may include environmental/ public interests on the topic, historic background of the topics, geological location of the areas studied, pollutant sources, chemical structures and properties of pollutants or substances [3] Pollution cases – Give at least two case studies, in detail, related to the topic you discuss and provide your comments and analysis on the cases discussed [4] Current research trends for the topic you discussed [5] Summary and Conclusions [6] References (you must include three most current and relevant reference articles cited in you project).