At this point, we are going to take a break from business scenarios and instead consider some topics you might want to write about in a more academic way (as opposed to writing for business documents). For this lab, you will examine several different styles of academic writing, and create a pros and cons list of different research paper topic possibilities. You will present your list in a table and practice your table-formatting skills to communicate this information in an easily-consumable visual layout. First, let’s learn just a bit about one way of categorizing writing:

Four Different Types of Writing Styles

All four styles of writing discussed in that article can lend themselves to a research paper, so let’s start a table to collect all our data together. Your table must contain:

List at three distinct research topics. Be sure to use the internet to search for research paper ideas.
For each topic, choose two writing styles to consider (expository, descriptive, persuasive, or narrative).
Create a pros and cons list for each writing style that includes at least five items total between both the pro and con side (so, two pros and three cons, etc.). The “pro” side will include reasons it would be easy or enjoyable to write about this topic in the chosen style, and the “con” side will detail reasons it would be difficult or challenging to write about the topic in the chosen style.
To create this yourself, you’ll need to use the various merge, split, and resizing options we’ve discussed, including AutoFit.

See the table below for an example of what the sample first topic would look like in a table with these formatting specifications. Your table doesn’t have to look exactly like this, but it should have an overall similar structure, use bullets, and be as aesthetically pleasing as you can manage.