Literature Review
For the literature review assignment, you will be required to select a technical topic; ideally, one related to your field of practice, and locate 5 sources that are related to that topic. The sources can vary in technical depth, although they should all generally apply to a semi-technical audience (that is, an audience with a working knowledge of the topic).
For each source, do the following:
Note the origin of the source (i.e. is it available only to professionals in your field, or can it be accessed by anyone? Is it a web page, a trade publication, etc.).
Indicate whether the source is primary or secondary.
Summarize the content and describe how it relates to your topic.
Note any implicit or explicit connections to other sources that you have chosen.
Describe how the content is related to your overall field of practice.
Evaluate the credibility of the source.
Evaluate the technical level of the source.
This Assignment draws from those readings – you will be creating a literature review of a technical topic, which requires you to identify, read, extract information from, and summarize various technical sources to provide an overview of the “state-of-the-art” for the topic you choose. Completion of this assignment is related to Assignment 3 – the topic you choose for this assignment should be the topic that you will later report on in the formal technical report. The intent of the assignment is to develop some strong background material that will later be used in the formal technical report.
A literature review is a slightly more academic type of technical writing than the persuasive proposal or the formal technical report, but it does develop your analytical capabilities, as well as your information gathering and comprehension, which is good foundational work for the formal report. The intent of a literature review is often to lay groundwork for a later, more comprehensive project, and to provide both the writer and the intended audience with a baseline level of knowledge, as well as current information on the topic.
