Overview
1. Visit the website www.mindtools.com. You will be able to acquire the information you seek without needing to register and/or pay. This is a website accepted by business schools as a reliable website. It is not good practice in higher education for students to apply and cite information from dictionary or encyclopedia websites, Wikipedia, Investopedia, or blogs (for example). Students may use these resources for their own use, but only as starting points for further investigation, not as respected or reliable references. Refer to the APA Publication Manual and/or the Purdue OWL APA website to see how to accurately cite APA in-text and reference citations for online referenced material.
2. Next, in the Mindtools website, click on the icon which emulates a magnifying glass. In the "Search the site" box, type in "Business Communication". A new page opens with a list of topics (all interesting). You likely will see 2,666, or more than 2,600, results from your search. Please note that not all of these resources are free; however, you will choose one (and only one) that is free. There are ample free resources (so no worries). Your choice of a Business Communication topics is now your starting point (choose one that interests you perhaps more than others on the list and choose one that includes the full-text article). Do not choose one for which you must pay money. Attempt to choose an article not chosen by someone else who has already posted their response. The intent is to learn from every research effort. Typically, every person has a different interest and rarely if ever have I seen the same resource chosen for this Discussion.
3. Next, go to the UIU library and choose a full text, peer-reviewed journal article (refer to the Week 1 Overview section for a reminder) related to your chosen mindtools.com topic (related to Business Communication).
4. For the third resource, go to your textbook and look in the Index for the topic (the one you chose from the mindtools.com website and the topic your chosen journal article has focus).
5. Write a three-five paragraph summary review of what you learned from these three resources about your chosen topic. You may include your own opinions and experience about the topic within your response. Somewhere, within the entire main response include one quote from the textbook, from the mindtools.com website, and from the journal article you acquired from the UIU library.
6. Use APA formatting for the three in-text citations and for the list of the three references at the end of the response. Refer to the APA Publication Manual for accurate formatting. (You should not cite the APA Manual as a reference.) Another resource to help in learning APA formatting is the Purdue OWL APA website. You already have experience with APA formatting of the textbook and journal articles in prior units. This is your opportunity to learn how to find APA-related resources by using how to use APA to format the mindtools.com website article (both in-text citation and reference list).
7. Give yourself the gift of allocating an appropriate amount of time to think, research, and write. Follow the directions. Run spell and grammar check and proofread your crafted response (reading aloud is highly recommended because it slows down the review, indicates where pauses are appropriate, and suggests where editing is beneficial). Discussion settings allow you to edit an already posted response without any change in date or time.