Tuesday, April 03, 2007

How to do research, not just search

Good advice from Dave Pollard as to how to do research. I especially liked his thoughts on citing secondary sources.
clipped from blogs.salon.com
ProcessofExposition

I've run into three
situations lately where I've advised people trying to start up
businesses to 'do their research'. What surprised me is that they
didn't know how to do
research. They are brilliant at doing searches,
and even figuring out what 'boolean strings' to use to get quickly to
the best search results, but the rest of the research process is a
mystery to them. So this is a bit of a primer on the research process.

Since research is the lion's
share of steps (a) and (b), let's take a look at these three steps in a
little more detail.

All of this is, of course, easier said than done. It takes a lot of
practice. But if you work at it, you'll find you become an excellent
researcher, and a more disciplined and critical thinker as well. And
those are skills with value far beyond the world of writing.
 powered by clipmarksblog it

No comments: