Discussion: please post your draft narrative report (or, if preferred, a summary) so that others may learn from your work and provide feedback. Please begin this post with a one or two-sentence overview of what your project is so that others can more easily make a connection.
Assignment:
Overview
With two weeks remaining in the course, it may seem harsh to require a draft of your final report. Believe me, submitting a draft this week is in your best interest because it pushes your project closer to the finish line and helps you to become more aware of gaps that you still have time to fill. This puts you in the position of having drafts of BOTH the Economic Model AND Narrative with two weeks before you. If you are up to date with the course, this means that Week 7 involves final writing. Week 7 (a short week/ends on Friday) becomes your fallback time for additions, tweaking, formatting, and, yes, even taking a deep breath. Writing madly in Week 7 is what we are trying to avoid. A little stress this week in submitting a draft narrative will bring huge dividends in lowered stress as you finish the course.
What is a Draft Narrative?
The starting point, of course, consists of your Matrix and Outline completed in the first week of class. The questions you identified in your Matrix should have led your inquiry and research. Your Outline may now need to be reworked to best fit your project, but it does provide a starting point for writing. Most students then begin completing the outline by inputting bullets, sub-topics, or short sentences into each chapter and building from there.
It is highly recommended that you review Chapter 14, Creating a Report, in the textbook, Doing by Learning.
Is a Draft Narrative Graded?
The assessment of the Draft Narrative, like the Draft Economic Model, is less about “grade” and more about “coaching” to ensure that you reach the finish line in two weeks. The draft should clearly show that you have made progress by completing most or all of your research, arriving at conclusions and solutions, developing a plan for moving forward, and addressing virtually all of the Areas of Management Practice. Less important is what it looks like! Incomplete sentences, sentence fragments, brain dumps of ideas, and bullet points are all fine IF the bundle shows substantive progress. The bottom line (and my responsibility) is to “assess” whether you have completed most of your heavy lifting, begun to document your work, and have presented a case that you are likely to complete more formal writing in the two remaining weeks.