English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

Research. The backbone of most major educational writing endeavors. Something that most of us have done to some extent since we started school. This week’s reading covered various ways with which to not only conduct research but also to organize the resulting data efficiently.

One thing that I learned that I plan on using in my own research is a research journal. This will greatly help me not only write a more thorough research blog but also help me track the various sources I’ve found.

In previous research projects I have done the “organize by notecard” idea. While this method works well if you are getting a lot of sources from books and you need to track titles, authors, page numbers, quotes, etc. I feel that this method isn’t very effective when using online sources though. One thing I have found that is extremely helpful is Google Notebook. The ability to “clip” quotes, facts, and whole pages and then review them later while similar to the note card idea is much better suited for online research. It is my experience that I can gather much more data, much more quickly and then weed out the lesser finds later.

Chapter 15 was Internet Research 101. Tabbed browsing, narrowing your searches with Boolean operators, and “dissecting URLs” is nothing new to me and most of the people in this class are probably in the same boat. It did have a list of websites that might be helpful in gather information. The Purdue Libraries website is also a great place to find non-website online references. They allow you the ability to access databases of articles that you would normally have to pay for, for free. One last comment about Chapter 15: “Para-sites”. Hahaha. Oh how punny and clever you are TH.

Chapter 16 focuses on using the things our parents used for research: books. Books vs. the internet. Both have good points and bad. While books are generally more factual and authoritative (any one can publish a website, it’s quite harder to publish your own book), depending on how fast the information on a subject is changing, they can be come quickly outdated. I have found that books are often good to use for projects involving history. The facts will (for the most part) remain the same although how people view them can change a great deal. The other nice thing about books is that when you go to a library, non-fiction books are grouped by subject which makes it easier to find information on a similar subject all in one place.

The final two chapters were the most interesting and informative by far. Chapter 17 explains the difference between summaries, paraphrasing, and quotes which had never been very well explained to me. This will be very helpful when my group goes to work on writing our white paper. We will want to ensure that we are properly incorporating the information we found into our writing. Chapter 18 is more of a refresher on plagiarism, which seems like common sense but then even major writer’s fall victim to it. These two chapters are extremely important as incorrectly quoting or referencing outside material can quickly be seen as plagiarism even if it is does unintentionally.