Research of "Campaign"

During class, our lecturer Mr. Kamarul had given us a lecture about "How to Write a (Thesis/Dissertation) Proposal" and we also got the papers of this topic, and I personally had read the content in the papers to review this topic. It is very useful and helpful for our studying and future planning projects. And now I'm going to insert the most important content from the papers just in case I lose the papers in the future.

How to Write a (Thesis/Dissertation) Proposal

February 2010, by Maury A. Nussbaum

1. Know the area. Read more, average 10-15 papers per week, at least read/scan the abstracts of the current journals. Use reference management software such as ProCite and EndNote. Use search engines such as MedLine, Ergo Abstracts, Psych Info, Compendex, ACM Digital Library, etc. Don't expect textbooks and other secondary sources to be wither accurate or completed and go to the source literature.

2. Go outside your area. Get good source of new/different ideas and avoid embarrassing overlap.

3. Pay attention to methods, analyses, motivations, applications such as "we did this because..." "This work can be applied to..."

4. Tree-in; tree-out. Look at paper citations, and who cited particular papers, note how others interpreted or how cited papers you've already read; they may have a different interpretation.

5. Don't get "paper locked". It's easy to get overwhelmed and biased by what has already been done. Once familiar with an area, what has and hasn't been done, start working on what you could do.

6. Look at the proposals and documents generated by your predecessors.

- What does a faculty member look for in a proposal

- Most, though, see it as a "contract". If you do this work, do it well and write it up well, they won't later claim that it's not appropriate or sufficient.

The proposal itself

1. It should be well-written, organized, with a logical flow; Concise but also complete; with good grammar. It's usually a good idea to have a colleague read it before giving to your advisor.

2. General structure is typically followed, but there's flexibility in the details. Introduction (background, motivation, literature view). Then objective/purpose/hypothesis. Methods and in the end preliminary results. 

3. Introduction is not a literature review, it should be a summery of existing evidence that motivates your specific proposed work. Start broad and end with a review, and broaden out to discuss potential importance of the proposed work. Indicate your part or contribution and scope your domain. Intro should contain some statement of objective, purpose and hypothesis. When summarizing existing literature, it is not enough just to describe what authors X.Y. and Z. did. Results should be interpreted, in the context of the overall review and study objectives. In the end, summarize evidence, rarely individual studies.

4. Objectives/Purposes should be non-quantitative, but specific and clearly filling some hole/need addressed in the introduction.

5. Hypotheses should also be non-quantitative, but again specific and clear. There must be clear indications of how statistical methods would be used to evaluate the hypotheses. In the methods, your statistical tests should make reference to these hypotheses.

6. Methods is about "what will be done, how, and why?" With respect to how and why, there is typically more than one way to do something, and you must explain your choice. The methods should have clear connections to the hypotheses. The reader should be able to understand what you are talking about.

7. Don't leave the readers to guess the limitations, expected results, contribution and future work. 

Some General Tips

- Each paragraph proceeds from general to specific. 

- Reading the first sentence of every paragraph in the document should convey the essential meaning of the whole.

- Vary the structure of your sentences and paragraphs.

- Use transitions between paragraphs. 

- Avoid one sentence paragraphs, at least three sentences comprise one paragraph.

- Consider optional presentation methods. Pick what is the most effective, but avoid duplication.

- Get in the habit of writing.

Some Common Mistakes to Avoid

- Repetitive sentence structure.

- Avoid complex words and convoluted sentence constructions, where simpler ones will convey the information. Eschew obfuscation!

- If you look at some of the best journals, they are typically written in a very dry, boring, direct, and terse style. It tends to be the weaker journals where creative writing flourishes!

What is Campaign?

Campaign is an operation or series of operations energetically pursued to accomplish a purpose.

Advertising Campaign
An advertising campaign is a series of advertisement messages that share a single idea and theme which make up an integrated marketing communication (IMC). Advertising campaigns appear in different media across a specific time frame.
The critical part of making an advertising campaign is determining a campaign theme as it sets the tone for the individual advertisements and other forms of marketing communications that will be used. The campaign theme is the central message that will be communicated in the promotional activities. The campaign themes are usually developed with the intention of being used for a substantial period but many of them are short lived due to factors such as being ineffective or market conditions and/or competition in the marketplace and marketing mix.
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

After reading what campaign is all about, I started looking for some interesting campaigns online to help myself gain inspirations from. Like this site that I've found: http://abduzeedo.com/35-creative-advertising-campaigns  There are many interesting campaigns, such as this

an environmental-friendly campaign to stop global warming. "World's drinkable water supplies are running out. Stop global warming."

And this one, "pull to release" the animals on this planet are treated so much different from our kind- humans, because we humans think their lives are not worth to have freedom, I've just watched this very depressed movie called "Earthlings" it's a documentary that documents the humans' cruel actions to the animals, we slaughter them for food, we hunt them for cloths and wearings and we even tease them for our entertainments. The animals in this world have feelings just like humans do, they must deserve better!

And this one, they use the methods of "graffiti" to do this campaign.

Here is a simple and short video campaign that's about peace in this world which is the theme that our team had selected. 

This is a charity campaign that's about the water problem in India, this video is full of facts and different people's statement of this problem, it is a documentary styled video campaign.

This is a brilliant one, it is a very creative concept to deliver the facts that "not everyone has enough food in this world" and also reflects countries to countries.

https://vimeo.com/37119711

And here is a very big and international campaign to catch this NO.1 criminal Kony Joseph. It's a half-hour documentary of how they did it and it went worldwide, it's worth to watch! 

There are many samples of different campaigns that I've found on the internet, I gotta say, I'm really touched by those that I've found and it's going to be a very good inspiring material for the campaign that we are doing in this semester.