Find an article about applications of computers in your major area. If you have not declared a major, choose one you may be interested in. Read the article and write a summary. (Lots of white space at the top, wide margins and wide line spacing are all fine, so long as you don't imagine the extra white space counts as part of your paper.) Your summary should be one to one and a half pages, double-spaced. Do use a word processor, and avail yourself of the spell checker. Your summary must contain a citation of the article summarized sufficient that the reader can find it easily.

You may choose a printed article from any serious publication. (This generally excludes those which routinely discuss Elvis sightings.) If in doubt, ask your instructor. You may not use a software manual or an advertisement.

Online articles are generally allowed, but you must have them approved first; feel free to email a link to Dr. Bennet to ask. An on-line article should generally come from an academic journal, established newspaper or magazine, or serious trade publication. Have your article approved before you write your summary, or you may have the pleasure of starting over. Articles from page factories, including About.com, eHow, Buzzle, Howstuffworks, WiseGeek, and thoughtco are not acceptable.

A printed article should be at least one page in length. For on-line articles stored as PDF documents, the document page is generally equivalent to a printed page. Articles which are published as plain web pages should print as at least two pages to be equivalent to a one-page printed document. That excludes headers, logos, indexes, or any decoration other than the text itself. (Web browsers use larger fonts and more white space than traditional printing, since electrons are cheap and easily recycled.) Use the print preview to measure the print length without killing any trees.

Please write your own summary. There's already a lab exercise for finding things on the Internet.

Hand in your paper as either word processor document or a PDF (Acrobat document) here. I also need to see the document you summarized. If it is available on the web, include its URL in your paper. If you can make a PDF, you can submit that with your paper at the above URL. (This often the best way to submit EBSCO papers, since their URLs expire.) If none of those are practical, hand your source in on paper.