Geology 113
Portfolio Project
Guideline 15

15. What were some common problem you saw in previous reports?

The most common problem was a tendency to provide far too much description about what an earthquake is, what a volcano is, and what a hurricane is. The letter from the County never asked for detailed descriptions of these events - the County asked for an argument about the likelihood. Descriptive information that does not contribute to your arguments will detract from it. Focus on the causes of the events, and provide factual information to support your arguments related to causes. Here are two contrasting examples:

1. "A hurricane can be 600 kilometers wide and 12 kilometers high. The hurricane has an eye. The eye is a clear, calm zone of low pressure in the center of the hurricane. The eye is small relative to the size of the hurricane. Meteorologists track movement of the hurricane (see Figure 2) by plotting the coordinates of latitude and longitude of the eye of the hurricane...."

2. "Hurricane tracks reveal the path of the eye of the hurricane - the center of the storm. Since hurricanes can be as large as 600 kilometers across, when you look at a map of hurricane tracks, it is important to realize that a region as far as 300 kilometers on each side of the track can be affected. Thus, the track located 100 kilometers off the coast of Delaware in Figure 2 indicates that Delaware could be ....."

Note how the first provides loads of intriguing, descriptive, yet irrelevant information (which the county never asked for), while the other uses some of the same information to support an argument about whether or not Delaware might be affected by a hurricane (which the County needs).

A second problem was using words such as major, and affect without being clear about what the terms meant. Other synonyms for major were massive, destructive, devasting; any such term should be defined. For example, some reports contained references to the likelihood of a major earthquake in Delaware and the likelihood of a major earthquake affecting Delaware without differentiating these two things. Occurring in Delaware and affecting Delaware may or may not be the same thing and need to be differentiated, not used interchangeably. What is a "major" hurricane" or a "major" earthquake? Is a major earthquake >6.0 on the Richter Scale? >8.0? This is important, since an 8.0 releases 900 times more energy than a 6.0! Decide what you want the words major, massive, affect, devastating and so on to actually mean, be clear about it (define in a footnote if you want), then go with it. The reader will at least know what you mean.

	Guideline Index		Guideline 16: We are not covering hurricanes in class until the end of April. Should our team start investigating hurricanes on the web now?
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