Q Topic 3: Beginning Your Research Some of you may be prepared to commit to a Senior Capstone Project topic; others of you may still unsure about what you are going to do. In this discussion, you will begin to answer questions that must be researched and resolved by the time you write your formal Senior Capstone Project Proposal Memo in Week 3. If you are not 100% committed to your topic, write about that as well. Feel free to work through ideas for more than one project here. Diligence in handling this activity will help you produce the first drafts of your Project Proposals next week. 1. BASIC TASK OR QUESTION: Write out your task or research question in one or two sentences here. You may wish to write more if you still searching for a suitable topic for your project. Feel free to test out some topics. 2. AUDIENCE: Describe the primary readers (listeners) of your project, including their professional backgrounds and any demographic information that you might know (age, sex, education, ethnicity, etc.) Will they be making a decision on the basis of your work? How do you think they feel about the topic already? If you will need to persuade them, what strategies do you think you will use? For more help with your audience analysis, ponder the questions in this handout or use the Audience as Boss worksheet from our Course Resources to develop your analysis. 3. SCOPE: Describe in more detail the kind of information that you will include in your project. If your project includes a scenario or a setting (e.g.l the executive speech), include information on that here as well. Alternatively, you might just brainstorm a list of questions here that your research will answer. Remember that you will probably want to begin with background questions to define and describe a situation or concept before you can begin to deal with it in depth. 4. RESEARCH METHODS: Where will you begin to look for sources? You will most likely want to find primary sources of information (e.g. people to interview or email for information) as well as secondary sources of information (e.g. library sources) Where will you start to gather your general information? Do you have a sense of where you’ll go from there? (Don’t forget to make use of the COMM 495 Course Guide available here.) 5. KEYWORDS FOR FINDING SECONDARY SOURCES: List the keywords that you think will be useful to you as you search for secondary sources. 6. ISSUES/QUESTIONS: Use this discussion as an opportunity to collaborate with your classmates! Write about any issues or questions that you have which are still unresolved. These could be questions about the assignment and the deliverables OR questions about something like narrowing your topic to meet the needs of a specific audience. (This section may be blank if you can think of nothing that is unresolved). Please post your initial response to this prompt by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, changing the title of your post to include your name, your project's option number, and your proposed topic. Then, respond to the initial posts of at least two classmates by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on Saturday. Continue your conversations through the end of the course week.