大二综合英语教学资料：Choosing and Evaluating Your Sources.pptVIP

Based on Steps to Writing Well (8th ed.) PP. 389-391 * * Choosing and Evaluating Your Sources After you have found a number of promising sources, take a closer look at them. The strength and credibility of your research paper will depend directly on the strength and credibility of your sources. To help you choose your print and online sources, ask yourself the following questions as you try to decide which facts, figures, and testimonies will best support or illustrate your ideas. Introduction Does this person have any expertise or particular knowledge about the subject matter? If the author of an article about nuclear fusion is a physics professor at a respected university, her views may be more informed than those of a writer of popular science. What do I know about the author? Internet sources, as mentioned earlier, may be highly suspect. In cases in which the background of a writer is unknown, you might examine the writer’s use of his or her own sources. Can sources for specific data or opinions be checked or verified? In addition, the objectivity of the author must be considered: some authors are clearly biased and may even stand to gain economically or politically from taking a particular point of view. What do I know about the author? Who published your sources? Major, well-known publishing houses can be one indication of a book’s credibility. (If you are unfamiliar with a particular publisher, consult a librarian or professor in that field.) What do I know about the publisher? For periodicals, consider the nature of the journal, magazine, or newspaper. Who is its intended audience? A highly technical paper on sickle-cell anemia, for example,might be weakened by citing a very general discussion of the disease from Health Digest; an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association, however, might be valuable. Is it a publication known to be fairly objective (the New York Times) or does it have a particular