Your goal will be to choose an essay topic and create a word cloud to help prepare for the essay to be submitted during Week 5. Please read this document for details regarding the assignment.  

ASSIGNMENT FOR WEEK #1: THE WRITING PROCESS   Objective:  This course will have you progressively build an essay during Weeks 1-5.  The completed essay will be due at the end of Week 5.  Let’s kick off our efforts during Week 1 and find a topic for your essay!  This week, you will submit a word cloud of the topic you intend to develop into an essay.   Week #1 contains the following assignment:   · Week #1: Prewriting Strategy. You will produce a word cloud concerning a topic of his or her own choice.   You will also need the following materials to prepare for this assignment:   · Computer   · Word processing program   You will need to use a computer that has a word processing program installed. These materials are crucial to successfully completing this assignment.   Part of this week’s assignment is to show the importance of planning and constructing the essay by beginning with a prewriting strategy (in this case a word cloud!) while embracing the following behaviors:   · Word processing skills   · Working knowledge of the Internet   WEEK #1: PREWRITING STRATEGY   Your objective is to produce a word cloud of the topic you intend to develop into an essay.  Remember, this assignment is the first step in building the essay due by the end of Week 5. Step 1.  To begin, you need to choose a topic for your essay.  Consult https://is.gd/IhP5cF and https://nyti.ms/1sJy7bi for a listing of over 500 potential topics and choose one of interest for your essay.   Step 2.  Now that you have a topic, collect a list of words and phrases relating to your essay’s topic.  It may be worthwhile to search, online, about your topic and finding which words and phrases linked to your topic.  Create the list, containing at least 40 words, in a Microsoft Word document and save it!   Step 3. Visit https://wordsift.org/.  Copy and paste the entire document you created during Step 2, into the WordSift textbox.  Click Sift! to process the freshly copy and pasted text.  A word cloud will appear.   Step 4.  Save the word cloud in PNG format by clicking the gear (in the upper right) and then clicking PNG at the bottom right:    The image of the word cloud will appear, and you should save it to your desktop.     Week #1’s Submission Submit the prewriting strategy, created in Step 4, to Week #1’s Assignment portal.