Biology 331 - Fall 2000

Ecology Seminar

Weekly writing assignments

Each week, you are assigned 25-100 pages of reading from the textbooks or related research papers. You are expected not only to read this material, but to attempt to understand it and to relate it to the course and to the labs. One way to clarify your understanding of the reading material is to write a short summary, in your own words, of the readings.

Each Monday, you should turn in a 1-2 page, double-spaced, 10-to-12 point type, printed essay summarizing the readings. Your essay should cover the readings assigned for the previous Wednesday and the current Monday (thus, for example, the first essay, due Sept. 18, should cover the readings of Sept. 13 and Sept. 18). Your essay must include the following:

1. Your name and the date.
2. The version number of your essay (1 or 2, see below).
3. The readings being summarized. Use standard citation format, as used in the journal Ecology. Please pay attention to formatting, including punctuation.
4. A 1-2 paragraph summary of the main points of the reading (analogous to the abstract of a research paper). This summary should include:
   1. The objective(s) of the chapter or the research paper;
   2. The methods used to meet the objective(s);
   3. The fundamental results of the chapter or research paper;
   4. The primary conclusion(s) of the chapter or research paper.
5. A 1 paragraph statement of what you think was the importance of the reading. In other words, why were you assigned this chapter (or paper) and not something else?
6. A 1 paragraph statement of how you think this reading connects to the course in general.
7. A summary of what parts of the readings you didn't understand.

Your essays will help us to guide the discussions in class.

In addition, I will go over each essay, comment on them, and assign them a provisional grade. Essays will be returned on Wednesday. Based on the comments, and the class discussion, you may want to re-write your essays to reflect what you have learned each week in discussions and in lab. If so, you can re-write your essay, and turn in a new essay (version 2), along with the original, edited essay (version 1), the following Monday. The re-write will also be edited and graded. The "final" grade assigned for each essay will be that from the last version you turn in (the re-write if you do it, else the first).