Chapter 1. Chapter 10 Applying Your Skills

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Applying Your Skills:
Anticipating Essay Questions

For many college writing assignments, you’ll need to find information from various sources and accurately cite those sources. This activity gives you practice developing these skills using the many resources of your campus library, and challenges you to compare and contrast these library resources with sources found online.

First, identify a topic you find interesting or even controversial. For help, type “controversial essay topics” into your Web browser, or select a topic that you’ll be writing about for an actual class assignment this term.

Next, go to the Web site for your college or university library. Locate the library’s general search engine (typically a box you can type in), which often appears on the library’s home page. (If you need help locating the search engine, reach out to the library staff — helping you find resources is their job!)

Use the library search engine to find five different sources for your topic. Sources may include a full book, book chapter, magazine or newspaper article, scholarly journal article, published dissertation, conference proceedings, technical report, film/video, or other Web documents or reports. To find these sources, type a series of search terms into the search engine. For example, let’s say you choose to investigate whether performance-enhancing drugs should be accepted in sports. In this case, you’d enter the key words “performance-enhancing drugs” and “sports” into the search engine.

In the text box below, provide citations for five of the sources you find during your search. Depending on your instructor’s preference, use either MLA (Modern Language Association) or APA (American Psychological Association) style to cite each source. For example, let’s say you locate the book Steroids: A New Look at Performance-Enhancing Drugs by Rob Beamish and the newspaper article “There Are No Sound Moral Arguments against Performance-Enhancing Drugs” by Chuck Klosterman. Your instructor requires APA style for citations, so you cite these sources as follows:

Beamish, R. (2011). Steroids: A new look at performance-enhancing drugs. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

Klosterman, C. (2013, August 30). There are no sound moral arguments against performance-enhancing drugs. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com.

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Once you’ve finishing citing your library sources, conduct a general Internet search on the same topic. Type the same key words into your Web browser (such as “performance-enhancing drugs” and “sports”) and select two Web sites that come up. As with your library sources, type citations for these two Web sources in the text box below using your instructor’s preferred citation style.

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Now, reflect on the information you’ve collected from both searches by responding to the following questions in the text box below.

  • What are the advantages of using the library to find sources of information for your topic? Were there any disadvantages to locating information this way — for example, was there anything about this process that you found challenging or that you’d like to do differently next time? Did you ask for help?
  • What are the advantages and disadvantages of conducting a general Internet search for information? Were the sources you found online different from those you found in the library catalog? If so, how?
  • How can you evaluate the quality of the sources you find online? List at least three ways to evaluate source quality.

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