Basic Formatting for the FEP

Things that would have been useful to know beforehand.

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Chicago Manual of Style, aka CMoS, aka Turabian. No, this is not in the any of the documentation or instructions. If you are unfamiliar with CMoS, I recommend using Purdue OWL's CMoS guide.

This is a little tricky. I've heard that 20 pages is too much, while others have said 30 pages is fine. I am not sure if that is total number of pages or just the narrative portion. I'd say no more than 20 pages for your Professional Development Plan and Work Products Essay combined.

My FEP was a total of 52 pages. However, the first two pages were the cover page and table of contents. The next 16 pages was my Work Products essay and Professional Development Plan. The next 6 pages were my references. The remaining 28 pages was the examples for my Work Products. That might seem like a lot, but due to the awkwardness of having to turn dynamic content into a Word document, most of that is space taken up with screenshots.

Overload, definitely. Be as detailed as possible. Have many references. Even if you don't cite the references in your FEP but you read/used it otherwise during the process, include it. When in doubt, include it.

Screenshots. Trust me on this. See Work Products Content for more information on why and how to use multimedia.

As of Fall 2018, you will submit five separate Word documents for your FEP.

Your Professional Development Plan will be one document. Another document will be your Work Products Essay, which is a narrative where you justify how each work product demonstrates the skills/competencies you've acquired during the TWU SLIS program. The other three Word documents will be the content of each of your Work Products.

As of Fall 2018, there was no requirement about naming the files. However, I recommend using the Surname-Document approach for each. For example: Smith-ProfessionalDevelopmentPlan, Smith-WorkProduct1, etc.

Your references should be at the end of both your Professional Development Plan and your Work Products Essay. You can use the same list of references for both documents; most likely both of those documents will use many of the same references.

The appendices should be placed in either the Professional Development Plan or Work Products Essay. If your appendices are Work Product content, they should go in one of the Work Product documents rather than as an appendix elsewhere.

I had originally made my FEP into a single Word document with my Work Products in the appendices. As I later discovered, this was not correct for submission. After breaking up my FEP into five individual documents, I was left with only two appendices in my Professional Development Plan.

You should ask your advisor first. You can also ask an instructor, especially if the instructor is from a class you are using for one of your Work Products. If all else fails, talk to your classmates or find other TWU grads and ask them. You can always email me at kburright at twu dot edu if you've run out of options.

It's because I might add more questions and answers later and am too lazy to retype the code, so I just left it in.

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