Understanding Assignments: How Do I Conduct Research?

Monday, October 22, 2018

Conducting Research

Freshman Composition teaches students the Elements of Argument. Argument is present in our lives every day, and even though the topics change over time, the structure, style, and organization of academic argument writing do not.

When you have been given an assignment that requires outside research, you need to first determine what type of outside research will be acceptable to your instructor. The typical expectation—for academic writing in schools—is for students to locate scholarly sources to lend support to the assertions in the student’s paper. What are scholarly sources? Scholarly sources are sources that are both reliable and credible sources. To be both reliable and credible, they need to have been peer-reviewed and published by a valid source with an academic reputation.

While many students first perform a search on the WWW (World Wide Web) to begin gathering outside sources, it is important to remember that sites such as Wikipedia should only be reviewed to stimulate pre-writing, gather argument ideas, and provide a springboard to stimulate your argument on the topic. Wikipedia should NEVER be used in an academic writing as it is not guaranteed reliable or credible.

As you review sources online, keep in mind the aspects for evaluating a verbal or written argument to know how logical the arguments being presented are in the source. Look for logical support, reliable sources to defend the argument, and possible manipulation through fallacies or inductive reasoning to gather ideas for your argument, your rebuttal of counter-arguments, and your evaluation of the overall topic.

While you will be able to locate scholarly sources online through general search engines, your best-bet is to simply log into your institutions online library system and conduct a search on aspects of your topic while using FULL TEXT as part of your search criteria. This will guarantee you scholarly sources, and you will be able to review these sources fully through the full-text image paid for by your institution.