General Notes on Your Draft Essays: Dear Chem 202,
Well done on your essay drafts. Each of you has personalized comments on your essay, but there were a few main problems which I will highlight here:
1. Verbatim Copying or very simple paraphrasing:
Almost all of you were guilty of this to a greater or lesser extent. Make sure that you write things in your own words and that you fully understand what you are writing. In your final draft you will be severely penalized if your essays still contain large sections of hardly altered text. It is easy to see when this happens because you are all using the same references.
2. Referencing
Attached to this email is an example of academic writing with referencing done in the ACS superscript numbered style, and the reference list.
The very first reference that you cite in the text will be number 1. The second 2 etc. If after reference 3 you cite reference 1 again you put a superscript1 in the text.
Your final reference list must have the references numbered and typed in the right style, in the order in which you used them. In other words, the first reference that you use is reference 1.
3. The Conclusion
Most of your essays just ended quite abruptly. Some of you did conclusions but I would like each of you to use the Reflection Model I have given you below to write a conclusion which should be between 200 and 300 words long and end off your essay nicely.
Conclude your essay with a section entitled ―Reflection‖ where you critically reflect on your essay and the experience of writing an academic essay for the first time.
Mention how writing the essay affected your understanding and enjoyment of the service- learning dye practical, if it all. Included in this section must be some of your thoughts on the applicability of chemistry and specifically organic chemistry to everyday life. Completing these sentences may be of help in critically reflecting on your essay:
Writing this academic essay was of benefit to me because... I found it difficult to do this essay writing task because... Some of the skills I learnt were...
My essay could have been better/easier if I had...
These sentences are just some ideas to help you get going. 4. Symyx Draw Structures
If you know the IUPAC name of your compound (which you should all know from the literature), go to the top of the Symyx Screen and choose the ―Chemistry‖ drop down menu. Go to ―Generate Structure from Text‖ and type in the IUPAC name, press enter and your structure will appear. If you don‘t know the IUPAC name then you will have to draw it which you can do using the templates. Then use the ―clean‖ function also in the drop down menu to make it look nice.
In order to show the important hydrogens in your structure automatically, go to the ―Options‖ drop-down menu and choose ―Settings.‖ Under ―Atoms,‖ click on ―show hydrogen labels‖ and change the setting from ―off‖ to ―hetero.‖ To draw a mechanism or reaction scheme, draw your structures and choose the correct arrows from the ―Arrows‖ tool bar. If it doesn‘t appear automatically go to ―Window‖ and click on ―Arrows Palette.‖
The Computer Lab on the First floor next to the Chem 2 Lab will be open from 2-5 on Tues and Wednesday Afternoon. I will install Symyx Draw on the computers there so you can use it if you cannot download it yourself. There will also be setup files on those computers so you can install Symyx on your computer if you want to.
Referencing Sample
Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are a relatively new and interesting class of compounds which have gained a large amount of recent attention due to their unique properties. They are the subject of a rapidly growing field of research investigating their remarkable characteristics; a large number of new materials have resulted, and various studies have been done in investigation of their application in a number of different areas, more specifically for this project in the area of the guest inclusion of other molecules. 1
Very simply, metal organic framework compounds are polymeric crystal lattices which contain metal or metal oxide centres linked by organic bridging ligands. The precise coordination geometry between the organic linkers and the metal centre gives the
molecules their distinctive scaffolding look and explains why they are porous on a micro and sometimes nanoscale. The materials are highly ordered and periodic crystal
structures. 2 This definition of metal organic frameworks covers those which contain guest molecules in their pores, and those which do not.1
The need for the development of safe and efficient means of hydrogen storage as a green energy carrier and alternative fuel means for engine driven machinery and motorcars, has led to the focus on these porous materials as potential hydrogen storage materials and due to their low densities and unusually high surface areas they are ideal candidates.3
The structural stability of MOFs upon water adsorption is a very important issue for potential applications of MOFs for gas adsorption and storage materials because water is very difficult to remove from industrial gas resources; however this aspect has received little attention in the literature.3
The metal organic framework compound studied in this project,
{Na[Cu2(H2C10O8)(OH)]∙7H2O}, has a copper oxide or hydroxide centre and a
benzenetetracarboxylate organic linker molecule. In this type of MOF it has been shown that the metal oxide cluster is primarily responsible for hydrogen adsorption, while the organic linker plays only a secondary role.3 For this reason, studying of the crystal unit and its pore is very important to try and identify where and how included molecules bind to the crystal framework and how stable their inclusion renders the crystal structure. An important question is: Does the framework decompose on addition or removal of water molecules? With this particular MOF this is a very pertinent question. The crystal occurs with 14 H2O molecules included in its pore. The number of molecules that are so strongly
bound that they can be considered to be part of the framework needs to be discovered. Computational Methods
Energy values are the basis to which almost all of a material‘s physical properties can be related. As such, the properties that are related to energy can be determined theoretically if energy values can be determined. 4
References
(1) Lamprecht, E. Thermal, Spectroscopic and X-Ray Diffraction Studies of
Copper(II)1,2,4,5-benzenetetracarboxylates and copper(II)oxalate: A study of Metal Organic Frameworks (PhD Thesis), Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 2008. (2) Frost, H.; Snurr, R. Q. J. Phys. Chem 2007, 111, 18794.
(3) Li, Y.; Yang, R. T. Langmuir 2007, 23, 12937.
(4) Allan, D. C.; Payne, M. C.; Teter, M. P. J. Chem. Soc. Faraday Trans. 1990, 86, 1221.