Incoming tutors to the Global Communications Center must take a practicum during their first semester as tutors. During the practicum, they are introduced to several genre conventions and learnable principles which they can use as foundations for the advice they offer writers in sessions. For a final project in the course, students must write a research proposal involving a substantial literature review, introducing research questions, and offering a research plan that will answer those questions. I chose to propose a research study into whether the practicum offers an adequate introduction to statistical writing and data visualization conventions. As someone with expertise in statistics and writing about statistics, I am particularly interested in whether the practicum is adequately preparing tutors for sessions about data-heavy writing.
Special note: Because submissions to the GCC are confidential, I eliminated the Appendix containing the example articles from this sample.
Date Written
December 2015
Target Audience
The Director of the Global Communications Center, any collaborators on the research proposed, other GCC tutors
Skills Developed
- Finding relevant research articles for the topic being studied
- Implementing the “novelty moves” in an abstract
- Extending those “novelty moves” across an introduction
- Writing a literature review incorporating several articles on a complex topic