Part 3

Materials and Content

Almost all essay writing requires sources. These come in two forms: books and articles.

You will need to become familiar with the electronic catalogue available at most libraries to access this information. Librarians are great resource people to assist you.

Books – Historically, books and author’s works have been the best sources for material, but this is changes as the world moves faster, information changes daily and the publishing world struggles to keep up. This can lead to material being out-of-date and can be overwhelmingly large bodies of material that you will have to filter through to find relevant material. Reading a whole book about a topic is time consuming and may not bring you the material or references you need.

Articles – Much is to be gained by focusing your research on articles. Articles are current and can range from periodicals, to academic journals. They can be available on library shelves or digitally. Articles are generally more specific; full of interesting, original, and up-to-date ideas and you may actually be using new information not known the reader of your essay. Bonus! Even if the articles you read are full of less pertinent details, they’ll still provide you with plenty to disagree with in your arguments.

Online Sources – The Internet is jam-packed with information; some of which is useful and reputable, and plenty of less useful and less reputable. Wikipedia is the modern substitute for the encyclopedia, and can provide plenty of sourced information; but the entries are not all written by published authors or institutions. Many of the sources will provide the necessary details about where the information was gathered or taken from. What it does provide is a quick understanding on controversial and contemporary issues. The Web has now become a plethora of resources but must be used with the understanding that not everything published there is reputable.

Plagiarism – Copying content from books, the Internet, and the materials found there is an unacceptable and illegal practice. Many universities now have special anti-plagiarism software, which is used to find stolen content in essays and other assignments. Every year, numerous careless (and sometimes unknowing) students are expelled from secondary and post-secondary education due to plagiarizing content, mostly from the Web. To be safe, you can use only ideas from the Internet with exact references to the sources, but you cannot copy the content.

Getting Started

Gather the books, periodicals, and a list of the websites you will be using. As you start reading, keep a notebook! Use a wide variety of categories to jot down all your ideas, thoughts, perspective and notes about what you read that led to certain things you will write about. As you start immersing yourself in your topic, ideas of thoughts may come to you at unlikely times, even away from your writing, so keep the notebook handy for recording these great thoughts.

Start your Bibliography List as soon as you start reading, researching and note making. It can be frustrating later to want to use an idea, and not recall where you read the idea, or saw the study, or learned of the quote.

The notebook can also act as a sort of censor, or a muse. It can be where you generate ideas or work through your writer’s block. Not all the ideas that accumulate here will make it to the essay, but having more than you need is a real benefit of the notebook.

Making Notes

While you are reading through your sources, most of the best ideas will come to you. They will be rough and in your own style of note taking. This is a big part of the process!

Don't make notes in the form of summaries. Instead, read through material twice to seek out the key ideas you want to work with. When a thought occurs under these circumstances it will be in reaction to a piece of the text at hand: a quotation. Copy out the quote, and a page reference so you can find it again to check it if necessary, and then put your idea underneath it. If you tie the idea in with the quote in this way, then your ideas will always be text-based and close to the concrete life of the text, as

Spread out your ideas in your notebook. You will need plenty of space between subtopics to develop the ideas. Deal with the sorting later, or if it works well, go through all of the notes every few days after they have accumulated. Take them out of the shorthand notebook: tear them out, or remove the spiral. Ensure you are including the sources for all and any of the content you are sourcing. Include where all the quotes and other materials are from, with author’s names, editions, page numbers, and URL information.