What to do. For this project, you will select two current authoritative publications, one trade
publication and one scholarly publication, from the discipline affiliated with your major or future
career and write a report about those sources. You are looking at the larger publications (e.g. the
whole journal or entire website) and analyzing their features to report the following aspects:
o what makes them authoritative, credible sources in your specific discipline?
o what classifies the scholarly source as scholarly, and the trade source as trade?
o what are their purposes, and how do you know?
o who are their intended audiences, and how do you know?
o do they have secondary audience, who are they and how do you know?
o how are they publishedin paper, online, through social media?
o in what ways are these sources similar and, more importantly, different?
The information you provide in your report should include examples from the sources (specific
articles, web pages, etc.) so make sure to properly cite ALL borrowed ideas and material and
anything that is not considered common knowledge.
Your report should inform your audience about credible sources affiliated with your discipline.
You are NOT offering a superficial analysis of your chosen sources. You must move beyond
what can be generally assumed about a source, or what can be gleaned from a database
description, so youll need to allow time for considerable research and analysis prior to drafting.
Sources. To be clear, you are analyzing and reporting on the larger publications as your
primary focus, not individual articles within those sources. Your primary sources for this
assignment are larger works from which information comes, such as entire journals, whole
websites, or the account as a whole on social media, etc. Individual articles or materials should
be used and cited for purposes of providing specific examples of its type of sources features.
Overall, this project should have 2 larger publications as sources and at least 4 specific articles or
sources being used as examples.
Audience. Write this for your peers in this class who may or may not be in your same
discipline. This means that I am not your audience. Details you provide must be rhetorically
sound and analytically comprehensive enough for peers that are outsiders and insiders of your
discipline to understand what about the sources makes them especially relevant to your
discipline.
Length & Format. Your project should follow complete and correct APA formatting (7 th
edition), including properly formatted in-text citations and a list of references. It will probably
take you around four to five full pages to write the report, plus a Cover page and the References
page, to complete this assignment. I do not want an abstract for this project.
