Assignment: Sustaining our Agricultural Resources
Assignment: Sustaining our Agricultural Resources
Prior to beginning work on this assignment, please read Chapter 3 in the Turk and Bensel’s Contemporary Environmental Issues textbook (2014).
The purpose of this assignment is twofold: first, to enable you to explore a term (concept, technique, place, etc.) related to this week’s theme of sustaining our agricultural resources; second, to provide your second contribution to a collective project, the Class Sustainable Living Guide. Your work this week, and in the weeks that follow, will be gathered (along with that of your peers) into a master document you will receive a few days after the end of the course. The document will provide everyone with a variety of ideas for how we can all live more sustainably in our homes and communities.
To complete this assignment,
You will first need to select a term from the list of choices in the Week 2 – Term Selection Forum. Reply to the forum with the term that you would like to research. Do not select a term that a classmate has already chosen. No two students will be researching the same topic.
Next, download the Week 2 Assignment Template and replace the guiding text with your own words based upon your online research. Please do not include a cover page. All references, however, should be cited in your work and listed at the end, following APA format expectations.
In the template, you will
Define the term thoroughly.
Clearly relate the term to the week’s theme.
Explain how the term affects living things and the physical world.
Relate the term to the challenge of achieving environmental sustainability.
Justify if the term represents an obstacle to that goal, or perhaps a technique or technology that might promote it.
Suggest two specific actions we can take to promote sustainability in relationship to this term.
Provide detailed examples to support your ideas.
The Week 2 Assignment
Must be three paragraphs in length (not including title, quoted text, or references and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s APA Style (Links to an external site.) resources.
Must utilize academic voice. See the Academic Voice (Links to an external site.) resource for additional guidance.
Must use at least two credible and/or scholarly sources in addition to the course text. You will need to cite the following at minimum:The class textbook, or provide a URL formatted according to APA standards to the resource in case your term was not in the text.
A scholarly source
A credible source.
To aid you in your research, and particularly in locating scholarly sources via the Ashford Library or using Google Scholar, please review the following Ashford videos and tutorials:Scholarly and Popular Resources (Links to an external site.)
How to Use FindIt@AU (Links to an external site.)
Database Search Tips (Links to an external site.)
Research, Keywords, and Databases: An Overview (Links to an external site.)
Accessing Full Text and Citation in Google Scholar (Links to an external site.)
The Scholarly, Peer Reviewed, and Other Credible Sources (Links to an external site.) table offers additional guidance on appropriate source types. If you have questions about whether a specific source is appropriate for this assignment, please contact your instructor. Your instructor has the final say about the appropriateness of a specific source for a particular assignment.
Must document any information used from sources in APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s Citing Within Your Paper guide. (Links to an external site.)
Must include a separate references list that is formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center. See the Formatting Your References List (Links to an external site.) resource in the Ashford Writing Center for specifications.
After proofreading your assignment carefully, please submit it to Waypoint.
Carefully review the Grading Rubric (Links to an external site.) for the criteria that will be used to evaluate your assignment.
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
