The Queue Journal

Eleven weekly entries of 100 to 250 words on queues you were in or watched, plus a closing note, submitted once as a single document.

Due: 21 May 2027 · Weight: 20%

The task#

Write one short entry a week, for eleven weeks, about a queue you were in or watched that week. Submit all of them together at the end.

This is the third of four pieces and it is worth 20 percent. You submit it once, in week 11, but it is written across the whole semester and it is marked on the whole semester. Set a recurring reminder in week 1.

The purpose is to build the habit of reading a queue without instruments, and to give you eleven worked examples of your own to draw on in the other three pieces. Entries are short by design.

What each entry has to contain#

Every entry carries a heading in this form:

Week 4 · queue observed 12 March 2027 · written 12 March 2027

Then 100 to 250 words covering four things:

1. Which queue. Where it was, what it was for, roughly how many people.
2. What happened. What you saw, including the discipline in operation and anything that broke it.
3. One thing you could measure. Name the quantity and the instrument. You do not have to measure it.
4. One thing you could not. Name it and say what makes it out of reach.

Points 3 and 4 are required in every entry. An entry missing either is incomplete.

Choosing queues#

Vary them. A journal of eleven supermarket tills meets the format and scores in the middle band, because the range of situations is the thing that makes the habit worth having.

Most entries should be about queues you did not choose to be in: an airport, a phone line, a half-time toilet queue, a wait for a reply to an email, a checkout, a boarding gate, a doctor’s waiting room, a traffic merge. Two or three entries may be about the queue you measured in week 1.

No entry needs a photograph, and the fieldwork conduct rules on the policies page apply to the journal as they do to everything else in this course.

Weeks with no entry#

Write Week 6: no entry and move on. A missing week stated as missing costs less than an entry written five weeks late and presented as contemporaneous. Do not backfill.

There is no entry for week 12. That week is the defence for The Redesign.

The closing note#

At most 300 words, at the end of the document, after the last entry. Answer these three questions directly:

• Which entry changed most between what you noticed at the time and what you would notice now?
• Which piece of course vocabulary shows up first in your entries, and in which week?
• Which queue in the journal would you most want to redesign, and why did you not choose it for The Redesign?

The closing note is not a summary of the entries. The marker has just read them.

What to submit#

One PDF, through the assessment portal on this site, by 17:00 Friday of week 11. Name it SLOP3068-A3-u1234567.pdf.

Entries in week order, week 1 first. Start each entry on its own paragraph with the heading above. Put your student number on the first page. There is no overall word limit; the per-entry limits do the work.

How the bands work#

This piece is marked holistically, as one document. The band descriptions are in the panel below this brief.

Two things are worth stating plainly because they decide most of the difference between bands. The first is spread of writing dates: eleven entries dated across eleven weeks read differently from eleven entries dated across four days, and the difference is visible. The second is whether the entries change. An entry from week 9 that could have been written in week 1 suggests the course has not reached the journal yet.

Lateness and extensions#

This piece is not accepted late. If you are not going to make the deadline, ask for an extension before it, not after. See the policies page for the reasoning and for academic integrity.