Blog Response 1

At times learning how to read for research is something I find complicated because I can’t  determine what information is more important than the other. Chapter eight addressed this problem with solutions and introduced different techniques, of learning how to read for research. A technique I found quite interesting is-being “ruthless”- going straight to what you’re looking for and eliminating extraneous information. In books this can easily be done by looking at the title. And by looking at the subtitle we can determine the books main focus. The preface and forward  is a preview to the reader-on what the author will discuss in the upcoming chapters. The table of contents and index is where you evaluate and examine what you need and what to omit. Chapter eight also suggests to ask constant questions about the book such as “How does this author’s beliefs compare or contrast with other things you’ve been reading?”(pg140).  A question I always ask myself is “is the information 100% accurate?”  This is very important because sometimes even the most reliable sources seem to make mistakes. For example, my brother’s high school history textbook (we would define this as a scholarly text, the information in this textbook has been “supposedly” verified by 100 professionals in the field of history)  labeled two prime minister’s names wrong (they were switched). Now imagine thousands of students in America being educated through this same textbook. In the bigger picture, its always good to find more then one reliable source for accuracy.

Another helpful technique everyone should be practicing is note-taking. Note-taking can be difficult, especially when the lecturer or pages of an encyclopedia seem to go on forever. But it’s actually quite easy. One way to ace this is to create a simple outline and to make sure you answer your research question.

My question: How do we research information through encyclopedias, do we follow the same format as we would for a book?

-SSIRA9018