Use the style guide (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.) that you are most familiar with.
As part of your recommendation report project, draft a memo to me summarizing the results of your preliminary research.
Your memo should summarize at least five (5) of the sources you’ve found so far, including one refereed or governmental sources (the others are your choice).
Your summary will help me evaluate the progress of your research, and help you organize the information you’ve found so far and decide what else you need. As a result, it needs to both present and evaluate the information from each source.
Be sure to:
1.Provide an introduction to the analyses of these sources.
- Provide bibliographic information for each source before the analysis of it appears
- Summarize the scope and major points for each source – i.e. what information does each article/web page cover?
- Explain how these sources fit into your overall project – Do they provide background information? Empirical research? Professional or personal opinions? Details on one particular subtopic?
- Evaluate the sources – i.e., how useful are they in your work?
Organize the memo by providing the bibliographic entry of the source first and then your summary and evaluation of that source. Provide a final paragraph that discusses how the five sources relate to each other; are they all on different topics, or do they overlap? Do they provide different approaches to the same topic (a research project, a personal opinion, and an overview for lay people, for instance)? Do they provide similar approaches to different topics (e.g. three separate government publications on different sub-topics).
Based on those relationships, you might, for instance, have a general introduction that evaluates the sources and explains how they fit in, then several paragraphs on the sources themselves. If two sources deal with similar topics, you might cover them together.