Blog 4 -Evaluating and Choosing Sources

I chose to write about chapter 6, “Evaluating and Choosing Sources,” because this will be my first research paper an I’d like to be fully prepared to get reliable sources and learn how to cite them. This chapter has made clear how vital the ability to thoroughly research is because you’ll need it for a number of things such as shopping for a car and obviously writing a research paper. I’ve learned that at the beginning of your research you’ll need to find some “general sources” to begin to understand the overall topic and discover key words related to your research. Once this is done and you have gained a general understanding of whatever you may be researching you can move onto specialized academic sources. These are usually journals written by experts in their field. They could be professors, doctors, or scientists and this text may seem complex at first but as you dig deeper into your research you’ll be able to find very useful information from these types of expert sources. These expert sources give the most up to date information, have reliable critiques on the topic, and it can help you form your own opinion. Moving on from these specialized academic sources are primary sources are directly written or composed by the writer and could potentially be a map, a rare plant specimen, or original music. They haven’t been analyzed by anyone yet like secondary sources do however. Secondary sources offer an analysis of a primary source, which means you have to be very careful when picking a secondary source for use since literally anyone can evaluate a primary source yet they may lack experience to talk on that topic. When deciding whether to use a source or not you need to ask yourelf a few questions. Is the writer of the piece a reliable one? Why did this person write this piece? For whom was it meant for? How did they get his/her information? Once these questions are answered you can then decide to use the source or not.