Writing often calls for research. Your curiosity may be triggered by a found object or image that you want to learn more about. An assignment may specify that you conduct research on your topic and cite your sources. Even if you’re writing about a topic on which you’re an expert, you may find that you don’t know enough about some aspect of the topic to write about it effectively without doing research.

You may need to do research at various stages of the writing process—early on, to help you understand or define your topic, and later on, to find additional examples and illustrations to support your thesis. Once you have developed a working thesis, consider what additional information, opinions, visuals, and media you might need.

Basically, you can do three kinds of research to support your thesis: library research, which includes books, periodicals, and databases (and perhaps archives of other kinds of sources, such as music, films, posters, photographs, and so on); online research, which gives you access to texts, visuals, media, and people on the Internet; and field research, which includes personal observation, interviews, surveys, and other means of gathering information directly. (For more information on conducting research, see Chapter 11.)