YOU CONDUCT RESEARCH EVERY DAY AND YOU PROBABLY DON’T EVEN REALIZE IT When you want to know the score of last night’s football game you check on line If you’re wondering how to spell or define supercilious you get out the dictionary And when you’ve forgotten the math assignment you e-mail your friends to ask them Although these research situations are rather informal the skills you use for them are similar to those you need to conduct research for writing After all research is basically just a search a search for sources that contain specific relevant and accurate information about your topic At the heart of nearly any research assignment are print sources books newspapers journals magazines and more Why These sources can provide useful background information as well as in-depth coverage of almost any top ic imaginable from Antarctica to zebras Let’s say for example that you have been asked to write about air pollution You can start the writing process by going to the library and checking out several books downloading online journal 4
articles and even viewing government records on the Internet With the hundreds of thousands of new books published every year along with millions of articles how do you even begin to find the ones you need Fortunately library catalogs and databases categorize print resources according to their subjects authors titles and more And hundreds of ref erence books provide additional information on general subjects along with lists of where to get more With so many resources at your fingertips it will be hard not to find some thing about your topic 5
LEARNING HOW TO LEARN 6
YOU ARE SURROUNDED BY PRINT RESOURCES At home at school even at the doctor’s office you will find books magazines and newspapers among others In fact you probably already have favorite books and magazines and those books and magazines might even be useful for some of your research If your favorite book is Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time for example you could use it as a source for a paper about the author or about science fantasy literature Or if your favorite magazine is Sports Illustrated it might serve as a source for a writing assignment on a specific sports star the use of steroids in professional sports or sports history Chances are though that you’ll need to search farther afield than what you can find at home for information on many topics Before you can begin that search you need to know what you are looking for where to find it and how to evaluate it These key skills are known as information literacy and according to the American Library Association a person who has mastered them has learned how to learn The first step in the process of becoming information literate and in doing any research with print sources or otherwise is to determine what kind of information you need That might seem obvious but it takes some planning If for example your topic is Africa you are going to be overwhelmed if you simply search for books and articles about the continent The world’s largest library the Library of Congress in Washington D C for example lists more than 10,000 books relating to Africa 7
