Use the Web Correctly

Either your essay is a success or an absolute failure depends on the evidence you include in it. And how you do it? The article dwells on common pitfalls of using source materials, and how to avoid them.

For many of students Internet has become an indispensable tool for doing the research.  It is not surprising as it seems to be an unlimited storage of facts, literature and information about any kind of topic. Surfing the Internet by mere bounding in – with no plan, possessing no experience, without consulting an expert is a crapshoot. You might think that you have found something that will look like a research, but in fact it is not. To take advantage of the Internet for your written assignments you should differentiate two types of on line searches: open searches and closed searches.  Open searches contain great number of publicly – available information on the net. They employ free search engines and subject directories. Surely using them for a serious research won’t do. Basically they are meant for informal and initial research as well as for brainstorming and for adding omitted facts to the text. For example when you need to know the government structure of Switzerland, or the year Joyce wrote “Ulysses”, period of Holocaust for your topic for holocaust essay use open search. Closed searches, in contrast, don’t employ the whole web but only certain, edited collections. As a rule you should have to pay for a closed search. However, as licenses and fees have often been arranged by one's organization (a college library or corporation), a closed search can feel free to an individual user. You need to use this type when you are doing formal research, for example in case you have to find particular document or a source for your reflective essay. Both types of research have their advantages for making your research easier. Though they aim at different things and require different search strategies. Close searches don’t utilize all the variety of the web. Whereas you can’t rely on authenticity of the information found at open searches. Moreover, they don’t provide you with the scientific data.

Many students mix the two types together and as a result their work abounds in bizarre tangents, a jumble of references, and it lacks scholarly formality and seriousness. Inadequate citations from the web are another factor spoiling the general impression of the students’ essays. Don’t just refer the readers to the home page.  It won’t allow them to reproduce and check your work. Citing the web source, remember to include the information about the type of online resource, a specific URL, data on author, the title of the document and a description, a publication or posting date, and a retrieval date, to name the key elements http://www.artcenter.edu. Any other kind of citation will be of no use in academic sense. The last thing you should know about citing – do it reasonably.

Mind, that while the web can provide advanced study on any topic, it also supplies you with a chaos of weird, non-academic things posted online. You should not forget that when you're writing an academic paper, part of your assignment is to apply sound judgment about what to cite and what to leave out.