CMNS 125, Professional Communications (John Bermingham)

The diagram below shows you that writing a paper is not a simple linear process.

There are various aspects that will affect what you look for and what you find. Half way through doing your paper, you might find something that really changes your perspective on the topic and how you want to write about it. So make sure you give yourself enough time for this.

Four Contexts of the Research Process

Adapted from: Head, A. J., & Eisenberg, M. B. (2009). Finding context: What today's college students say about conducting research in the digital age. Retrieved from https://www.projectinfolit.org/publications.html

First of all you need to think about what interests you and then brainstorm some ideas. One technique you can use is called concept mapping or mind mapping.

1. Write your topic/idea in the centre of the page; draw a bubble around it.
2. Now create new bubbles around the edges of this bubble, containing all the ideas that you can think of; use lines to connect these bubbles to the main idea or topic.
3. Continue adding related ideas, using lines to connect them, until you've run out of ideas.

Here are a couple of examples:

Or:

Now take a look at your concept map. If you try to do a presentation about the subject in the middle you will probably be talking for a very, very, long time. 

You need to look at the ideas as the side and see which one you like the most. 

So I can't write about substance abuse because it is too big a topic. I noticed that I am really interested in the prevention of it, so I am going to focus on that. Prevention is a narrower topic of substance abuse.

Prevention is still quite a big topic but I am going to think about how I can prevent it in my community which makes my topic even narrower. Maybe even too narrow but you need to start somewhere!

Take a look at this video from Las Positas College Library to see how they develop their ideas.

Here's another example:

Adapted from: ENGL 1050 Thought & Writing Research Guide: Deciding on a Topic, Western Michigan University

Using our Find It box on the library homepage, you will get access to many different types of resources.

Your results will look something like this:

1. Is called a Research Starter. It is like Wikipedia but more reliable.
2. Is how you can limit your search to books (Print Books) or journal articles (Scholarly Peer Reviewed) as well as limit the date.
3. Is how you can search for Canadian resources.
4. Is how you can find more encyclopedia entries.

Some more tips:

Use the "Tools" to email/print/ save yourself the article.   You can also see a citation if you press the Cite button. Always double check the citation is correct though!   Use the limits that are available:   Use Geography to limit to Canada (including provinces and cities)   Use Subjects to find more specific topic areas   Use Limit by Database if you only want medical articles (Medline or CINAHL) or psychology articles (PsycINFO)

Okay, these people are really practiced at presenting both sides but watching their style and how they present their arguments will, hopefully, help you with your writing.

Take a look at these three resources. What clues do you look for to identify an academic article?

To check your answers look here:

With so many ebooks available out there, often you think you are looking at a journal article when actually you are looking at a book chapter.

In your memo you are asked to use non-academic lanugage, so you are aware that authors write for different audiences. They may be presenting the same idea to two groups of people but they choose to present that idea using different methods. You will therefore start to notice that journal articles are written with the assumption that you already know about the topic. Therefore you will find the language hard to understand if you are not already familiar with the subject area. Books are usually written with the assumption that you don't know anything about the topic and that you are reading them because you need an introduction. So when you put a chapter beside a journal article you will probably find that the chapter is much easier to understand.

Take a look a the links below and ask yourself. Is it a book chapter or an article?

Evaluating Your Sources

Although librarians have carefully compiled these sources, there is no substitute for your own evaluation. Use the following guides to help you.

Improve Your Googling

To avoid searching through endless unreliable websites, improve your google searches from the start.

Use these as part of your search:

site:.edu (to search only U.S. universities), e.g. "social media" influences site:.edu

site:.ac.uk (to search only UK Universities), e.g "artificial intelligence" workplace site:.ac.uk

site:.gov (to search the US gov website.)

site:.gc.ca OR site:.canada.ca (to search the Canadian gov website.)

site:.org (to search organizations)

Also include words like disseration, thesis, or pdf to bring up more reliable documents.

Try COVID-19 pdf site:.canada.ca or "social media" pdf site:.gc.ca