CS378 Assignment 2

Due: Friday, Feb. 15 at class time; bring a hard copy to class (send it electronically if you won't be in class).

Note you can work with one other student on this project. Be sure to identify both members of the team and include a sentence explaining the contributions of each.

As an IA professional, you have studied thoroughly the issues involved in CyberWarfare and become fascinated by this subject. You have decided that you might even like to write a book on the subject. You've never written a book before so you do some research and find that a first step is writing a proposal that your agent can shop around to various publishers. Such a proposal should contain the following elements:

  1. A short description of the proposed topic and why it is an important and interesting topic that would be of interest to the target audience.
  2. A description of your target audience (e.g., academics, security experts, business leaders, the general public).
  3. The basic approach / goal of your book. For example, your goal might be surveying the area for a general audience. It might be arguing for more government involvement in this area. It might be advising business on the threats. The goal should be appropriate for the target audience of your book.
  4. A list of the proposed chapter titles with a one or two sentence summary of the content of each chapter.
  5. An annotated bibliography of some (at least 5) recent books on this topic. You can access this information easily on Amazon.com.
A real proposal would also contain a proposed timeline and business justification but you don't need to worry about those.

It is reasonable that a proposal of this nature would take 4-5 pages, but that's just a guess. With any assignment this semester, the page count is a suggestion. If you can do the job adequately in fewer pages or more pages, that's OK.

Grading Information:

This and subsequent writing assignments will be graded on the following criteria:
  1. Did you do the assignment as specified?
  2. Did you give it adequate thought and care?
  3. Is your argument well reasoned and supported by evidence?
  4. Is the document formatted reasonably? (It's better short than padded.)
  5. Are references cited correctly?
  6. Is the writing style acceptable?
We're not grading on grammar or spelling, but you should make a credible effort to write in a style worthy of a student at a top-tier university.